What are you supposed to do when Forbes ranks your city as the most miserable in America? Rally city supporters and create a tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign.
That’s what Positively Cleveland, the Ohio city’s convention and visitors bureau, has done after Forbes proclaimed the city as the country’s most miserable last Thursday. Tami Brown, Positively Cleveland’s vice president of marketing, says the day the article came out, the bureau commissioned a local improv troupe to put together a video poking holes in the miserable title. In the video, actors gripe that there are too many sports and live entertainment options in town, and that commutes are so short they don’t have time to do their make-up in the car. There’s also a funny bit where upon hearing that Cleveland has been called the most miserable city, a group of Cleveland people jump up and cheer – which of course, doesn’t make them seem all that miserable.
As I argued in my Kanye West post a while back, thanks in large part to the Internet marketing communications has changed from a brute force approach of bombarding people with a predisposed message until it sticks to something more dynamic where you adapt to what’s “out there” in terms of what’s your brand’s place in culture. To use an analogy, it’s branding by aikido, not by karate. I think you can see the change in thinking in Clevaland’s case as well. Instead of trying to “fight” their new infamous title, they decided to engage it head on, by embracing it and then giving it a meaning makeover.
The sixth and supposedly last season started yesterday in the US (the parts are available in Germany always one day later), however in the last couple of days / weeks a few marketing gigs have already taken place. Such as this one: you can book a flight on Oceanic 815 from Sydney to L.A. on kayak.com – for a horrendous price, of course. Quite a nice idea!
I think this is a step beyond amusement parks like Disneyland, “a miniature Paris in Las Vegas”, and other oft-used examples of hyperreality. And it’s not really alternate reality gaming, cosplay or siteseeing either, it’s something else. I just don’t know what to call this.
Continuing on a theme I wrote about earlier regarding t-shirts that raid pop culture with savvy and disregard to copyright. What intrigued me about the t-shirts was how they they went around copyright laws by referencing bits about movies that were juuuuuuuust out of copyright, sort of speak. I also appreciated the obscurity of the pop culture references, it makes for very fun “reading”.
Lately I’ve stumbled upon two similar examples, which further highlight this trend, but in different ways. The first is an example of just plain ignoring copyright. The way the Internet has opened up commerce is that there’s now a supplier for pretty much everything you could wish for. Take this Ironman sticker I just ordered for my laptop from China. There’s no possibility that a company like Marvel (which holds Ironman’s property rights) could keep track of all of these sellers to shut them down (especially since it’s in China), and the thing is, small retailers like this usually have these great niche ideas such as this that probably wouldn’t make out of the corporate boardroom. They’re creating a unique product that I feel benefits Marvel and Ironman more than it hurts them in lost revenue. (Hat tip to /Film, again).
The second example is closer to the t-shirt example: going around copyright by obscuring your references and use of intellectual property. A graphic designer called Albert Exergian has created some really cool minimalistic movie posters for TV shows. Again, he’s not using anything that could compromise him for legal action (save for the trademarks) so he’s flying under the radar in that sense. But I can really appreciate the creativity that came from these legal constraints. He’s given all these TV shows a unique twist, sort of riddling them.
I think we’ll be seeing more of ventures like these that both challenge copyright but also challenge the consumers’ levels of cultural knowledge. I guess you could call it “piracy done with style”? Or something.
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