I was cruising around the Washington Post website the other day and saw this banner ad for life insurance:
Naturally all I and everyone reads at first is “IF YOU DIED TODAY,” because it includes the words “you” and “died” and is in a bigger font than the rest of the text in the ad. (See what they did there?) My first thought was, “Well, if I ‘died today’ I guess I could stop dieting for that physical in two weeks…which I probably shouldn’t be doing anyway because who even cares,” and, as Life’s a Pitch devotees and clients could probably guess, my second thought was, “that would be kind of a not funny/funny marketing campaign for my artists.”
…or how about:
Life insurance has death threats! Toilet paper has yellow lab puppies! Online investing sites apparently have creepy talking babies that people seem to like for reasons I don’t understand! We in classical music really need to step it up if we want to compete.
LOL-Great commentary, Amanda!
It’s obviously a scare tactic, but perhaps it’d be more effective on me if your idea for the campaign were serious. There’s so much great music that I’ll probably never hear simply because there’s too much of it!
BTW, I agree about the talking-baby commercials, and to which Schoenberg Concerto are you referring to?