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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Decorating for other holidays

Like This, But On My Lawn

Every year, around this time on the calendar, I become very wistful. A quick digression to explain.

When my wife and I had our first child, and much more free time, we had such grand plans. Not for the usual things that fall by the wayside -- the kid won't ever eat sugar, watch television, play video games, etc. -- but for other aspects. We both come from creative backgrounds, and also have idiosyncratic and highly active senses of humor. I listen to a ton of comedy podcasts in my spare time, have done stand up comedy a few times, devour specials on Netflix and go to the occasional show. I also write for comedy on other blogs, and really can't get through the day without exploring such tangents in my mind.

Not the least of which was the idea that decorating one's house for Halloween and Christmas, while fun and fine and dandy, really didn't go far enough. At least, not for the purposes of High Creativity.

To wit: why not President's Day? (But only the more obscure ones; giant heads of Martin van Buren and Millard Fillmore on top of the house, just to see what kind of comments we can generate.) I'd rather skip Valentine's Day because it just seems tacky, but some kind of vengeful leprechaun action might be interesting for St. Patrick's, or maybe just a great mass of snakes to symbolize what was being driven out of Ireland. Mother's Day should get as many mothers in the windows as possible (Mother Teresa, Ma Kettle, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), and Flag Day could get the place looking as close to the UN as possible.

This doesn't even get us into the more obscure ones, of course. Big Bill Murray printouts for Groundhog Day, the never ending spree of numbers for Pi Day, all manners of madness for Leap Day (perhaps the most special of holidays, given the rareness)... there's opportunities on a daily basis to be the kind of people that the rest of the neighborhood either treasures or avoids. If your life is the story that you tell about it, I'm fond of the idea that the story should be big and memorable. Or, failing that, more than a little goofy. It's how I'm wired.

Of course, this isn't what happens in the day to day. Just staying ahead of the writing, the day job, the fitness goals and the other obligations is 3 or 4 jobs, and there isn't enough money, or time, for the things we should be setting aside money and time for (college, retirement, charity, sleep...), let alone hardcore foolishness and inexplicable public behavior.

But, still.

The temptation to construct a field of presidential busts in a "Hunger Games" style arena on the front lawn, just to make the President's Day weekend more than a little sinister and very, very memorable?

Well, if we ever manage to have a significant Wealth Event from one of our clients with equity, it's gonna happen.

And if it starts a movement?

As good of a marketing moment as anything I've ever done, honestly...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit the site. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Taxes On The Stupid

Pay Up

When I was a (had to be) remarkably painful to live with teenager, my mother would spend a few bucks on the lottery. As a single mother raising three kids on her own, it was likely one of life's few and good diversions for her, as a bartender who logged late hours to keep a roof over our head. She'd connect more than a few times on the three digit daily draw, and when that happened, she's share the wealth. Nothing too dire or difficult in that, right?

Well, of course not. But here's where I prove my stripes as a world-class pain in the posterior. Having always had a political bent for aspects involving class systems and how poor people stayed poor (yes, you guessed it, we were not particularly well to do), I had picked up what legislators called lotteries, in private.

"Taxes on the stupid."

Now, to be very clear about this: I'm not insulting my mother's intellect, either then or now. The same way I'm not insulting anyone who played and lost in the most recent spasm of activity. We are, at our core, nearly helpless to resist the momentary good feeling and day dreaming that hits when we've got a ticket in our hands, and the simple truths of the purchase are undeniable. Can't win if you don't play. It's only a trivial amount of money. It's fun to dream.

But what's not fun is paying off people who think you are stupid, and proving it with the payment.

So I made my mom a deal, all those years ago. I told her that the next time she hit the lottery, I wanted no part of the winnings... but that every time she played, I wanted her to give me a dollar. For whatever reason, she put up with this disrespect. And then I left those dollars in plain sight, in my room, near where she'd drop off laundry. (Why wasn't I doing my own laundry by the time I was a teenager? No idea, really. Probably because, as this whole story shows, Mom had the good wisdom to regard laundry as a welcome respite from putting up with me. Anyway...)

I was fortunate enough, as a kid, to have relatively steady employment. First as a paperboy, then as a gopher and counter person at a miniature golf course, and finally as a content provider at a pre-Internet telecommunications start up. So I didn't have to touch that pile of dollar bills that started piling up on my dresser. And when they hit a certain tipping point -- probably $50 or $60 -- my mom told me tht she wasn't playing the lottery any more, and I'd made my point. (She also refused to take back the pile.)

Since then, lotteries have only gotten bigger, with a spiraling amount of "news" coverage that just strikes me as downright unseemly. I pay my own taxes for being dumb, mostly through gambling with friends at a poker table or in fantasy leagues, or less often, in casinos. (It's still a tax on the stupid, but the difference is that I can feel like I've earned my luck in those games. It's a more fun illusion.) But I never got the lottery bug, because I've never lost the need to refuse payment of cynical political operatives. Or the knowledge that the only people who consistently get paid from this game are the ones working for the house.

Where this ties into the mission statement of marketing and advertising perspective is that we all, as professionals, make pitches to ourselves just to get through the day. Knowing why a pitch works allows you to counter it, use its power to subvert it, and maybe, in the long run, make better choices. Or, at least, better pitches.

Our world would be better without lotteries. Especially if we just donated to charities routinely, rather than believe the most over the top cynical political move of saying how a portion of the proceeds goes to a good cause, so losing in the lottery is just like charity.

And the trick to taking the juice out of this purchase, and keeping more people from succumbing to inertia the next time the pot gets big enough to make everyone forget the earlier losses?

Well, turning off the unpaid propaganda for it in the media would be a start. As would keeping in mind what the people who run the games think of the customers...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit the site. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.