tuesday, march 27, 2007
Unsolicited comments on boring ads
The United States Postal Service has an ongoing promotion where it sends everyone postcards about its services, illustrated with Cathy comics. People don’t seem to like them much. Here’s one that somebody on Flickr took a picture of:
I saw one of these a while ago and had a great time analyzing the dichotomies that it struggles with: formal/casual, strange/normal, advertising/public-service. It’s eye-catchingly dumb. Cathy is like Garfield: bland, inoffensive, and appeals to the lowest common denominator. The characters are familiar to everyone, but in a different context (the back of the newspaper), so these postcards capture your attention more than a normal announcement would. The choice seems strange, though, because the Postal Service is using its semi-public money to subtly advertise for a private enterprise — so would the postcards be more effective if they commissioned a Cathy rip-off instead? People might not dislike those postcards so much (they’d still be lame, but without the hyper-unfunny connotations of Cathy), but they wouldn’t draw as much attention.
While discussing this, a friend said, “Part of what struck me as odd is that the Post Office presents itself as a serious shipping firm, like UPS or FedEx, but then it sends this whimsical notice about services, and more so, it was a notice about vacation hold on mail. Is anyone unaware of that?” Are enough people unaware to make this a cost-effective promotion?
From the USPS press release:
“We’ve begun a dialogue with our customers about our services, and chose two characters [Cathy and Dilbert] everyone can relate to in helping to tell our story,” said Anita Bizzotto, USPS Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President. “We wanted to connect with people in a way that was interesting and humorous.”
I don’t think it quite worked: it got the message across, but not in the desired positive way. I wonder whether they asked any real people about how much they “relate” to Cathy; I don’t know anybody who does. Maybe the Dilbert postcards are more effective, but I haven’t seen them.
comments (2)
I wish someone would do a page that randomly spliced together Cathy like this one (Garfield) http://www.dougshaw.com/garfield.html
– JW on 3/27/2007 08:23:31
hehe. i'm a fan of the random pokey generator: http://davidguy.brinkster.net/randompokeygenerator/
– britta on 3/27/2007 09:03:42
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
