What we made in 2019 (that wasn't a Mojito).

Nine months?  It’s really been nine months since this blog has been updated?  I guess we’re like your relatives in Florida.  When you don’t hear from us, it means we’ve found work.

Not that America’s favorite restaurant/ad agency couldn’t use more work, but our 14 month-long dry spell ended spectacularly with a mobile and out-of-home campaign that re-defined a category and got our client his fifteen minutes of fame.  Even if he was only famous among undertakers.

When we blogged way back in June, it was to share-—OK, brag about--our recently completed work for the Lempke-McKray family of cemeteries and funerial homes.  You’ll recall the ads.  Each showed the point-of view of someone about to engage in a seriously dangerous activity along with the line, “Like, go for it,” paid off by the funerial company’s logo. The versions for the client also included the line, “The First Family of cemeteries and funeral parlors”.  We dropped that the first family crap for our reprints.  Not needed.

 

Owing to the fact every modern daredevil has some type of helmet with a Go-pro Camera permanently affixed to it, securing video for the campaign translated to about an hour of online research.  We found stellar footage of a parkour athlete pausing before a 10-foot gap between rooftops, a BMXer with the front tire of his bike cresting over the lip of a ski jump and the feet of an Acapulco cliff diver peering over the void, all of which were so unsettling they induced nervous laughter in just about everyone who saw them.  The posters were actually more work.  Kat, our seating hostess and design student, had moved on, forcing us to hire someone who knew Photoshop and to cobble together some pictures found online with photographs we took of the tip of a skateboard and someone running with the bulls in Paloma.

 

All in all, our out-of-pocket was around $250, plus another $100 for pitchers and brats from our brainstorming session at the Hofbrau.  As any marketing professional will tell you, if you can keep your costs for doing an integrated marketing campaign under $500, you are almost guaranteed to make a profit.

“Almost.”  Uncle Jer proved to be one of those clients you really like at the beginning of a project and then, nine-tenths of the way through it, turns to you and says, “You guys are too expensive,” and “Brittany and I can take it from here.”

Which was news to Brittany, whose skill set included showing people to their tables, having red hair and being Uncle Jer’s niece.  Our newest seating hostess was, by her own admission, ill prepared to take over the implementation of an integrated campaign or hiring a web designer and coder.  “Hey, I’m just the introducer,” she said, coining a term George W. Bush would have approved of. 

 

What does it mean when your first real advertising assignment in a year makes you wish you wistful for the simplicity of slinging mojitos and serving up plates of surf ‘n turf to teachers and cops?  I think it just means that Smugglers’ Inn, the marketing concern, is ready for a fresh challenge.  One that will wash away the bitter taste of seeing what could have been a campaign that defined advertising in the late two thousand teens sealed in a lead-lined box and thrown into a volcano.  With extreme prejudice.

The day after Uncle Jer was on WCCO, the local CBS affiliate, talking about his “wacky” ad campaign, (which he forgot to say he hadn’t created), he received a call from an investment bank interested in acquiring the First Family of Cemeteries and Funeral Parlors to go with the other 25 unrelated businesses they had bought at fire sale prices.  It turns out that the whole time that we were frantically preparing to roll out the Washburn-McKay campaign, Uncle Jer and his lawyer (the same lawyer who had recommended against hiring Smugglers’ Inn) were negotiating the terms of a sale to Caswell Capital of Colorado Springs. Caswell Capital had no intention of sponsoring X-game athletes or seeing ads for the death industry break the one million views tally on YouTube.  They bought up companies and either sold off the pieces or restructured them so that they could function (barely) with half the people.  Uncle Jer might have told us, if only so we could rush ahead and run all the work once so it would be eligible for awards shows.  

 

Not that we can afford to enter award shows now.  The Northtown Shopping Center is simultaneously dying and raising rents on its remaining businesses.  Like Smugglers’ Inn.  Life is hard and then you get free health care, as the saying goes.  Looking back on what our prospects were a year ago, we at Smugglers’ Inn can’t help but feel optimism looking forward to this shiny new decade. 

Mixed with fear because in two days, Smug’s will be hosting its 47^rd New Year’s Eve and all the drunkenness, atrocious music, fisticuffs, returned steaks, vomit and broken stemware that the end of December always entails. Happy New Year, dear readers.  Drive safely and avoid the Coon Rapids-Anoka corridor at all costs.  I promise it won’t be another six months before I blog again. When I do, there will be big, BIG news to report.  Stay alive for it.

Back in the saddle, part 2.

“The first thing we do, we’ll give all the lawyers wedgies.”  I think Shakespeare said that.  Fie, and fo fum on the pencil-necked lot of them.   After having done the best ad campaign in the category, EVER, Our client, the Lempke-McKray family of funeral parlors and cemeteries was having second thoughts.   All because of some (cough, spit) lawyer.

"So what, exactly, did the attorney say?”  Carol, our day manager/senior art director asked Arpil, whose familial connection to the McKray in Lempke-McKray was the reason that Smug’s ad division had come out of hibernation to sell funeral plots to millennials.   April, if you haven’t been reading this blog, was Smugglers’ Inn’s new seating hostess, except she had been given a promotion to server for her role in landing the restaurant its first genuine branding assignment in over a year.  

“He said he was 50/50,” said April, twirling a ginger lock around a manicured finger.  “He wouldn’t stop Uncle Jer from running the stuff you did, but he pointed out that there was, like, risk.”

“Well,  Uncle Jer has a risk of me kicking his dimpled, entrepreneurial ass if he thinks that we did all that for free.”

 I put my hand on Carol’s shoulder and led her away from the hostess’ lectern where the three of us had congregated.   There were only six people having dinner at 5:45, but I thought it best we didn’t brawl in front of them, early-dining cheapskates though they may be.   Carol made one of those corny, “my eyes are on you” gestures over her shoulder at April, who stuck out her tongue.  Did I mention I work in a playground?

“She hates me,” said April, twirling a new lock . “I’m nice to HER.”

“She’s just frustrated.  I think we all are.  What can we do to convince your uncle and this lawyer that he should just trust us and go with this campaign?”

“My mom always called him her brother in law, the adding machine.  Uncle Jer always has a reason for doing what he does.  And the reason is always money.”

  “Then he should be all over this.   We have everything figured out, social media, SEO, events, out of home advertising, targeted partnerships.   I wouldn’t be surprised that this campaign would increase their name recognition by 50-70% and traffic to the website by several fold.”

“You mean, it would win an award.”

“Awards are nice.”

Before you criticize me for being just another ad man who places winning some brass statuette or Lucite globule over the needs and wishes of his client, let me tell you some things about this campaign.  The first thing is, I didn’t do it.  Well, I was the creative director.  Which means I could attach my name to it, I suppose—but the real authors were Scotty and Erin, our bartender and relief seating hostess, respectively.  If anyone should be credited with “Like, go for it,” it would be those two.  

  

Of course, I helped.  I started the brainstorming session by asking, “what’s the very opposite of funerals and death?”   This approach exploits something called “cognitive dissonance” which happens when you have to consider two  mutually exclusive things at the same time.   I found it in a marketing book.  Well, an online course.  OK, it was a YouTube video.  The point is, I FOUND IT.

“Skydiving!” said Erin.

“Punching a cop!” said Scotty.

“Punching a meter maid!” said Erin.

“Punching a shark!” 

“Punching the Little Mermaid!  Or Santa.  Or  that bitch,  Mother Theresa!”

“She’s dead.”

“Punching dead Mother Theresa!”

“Go for it! Arrr!”

“Arrr!” said Erin.

“Arrrrrrrrr!” said all of us, pounding our faux pewter beer steins on the Hofbrau’s faux Medieval banquet table.

And there you have it.   A first-round knockout that Mike Tyson would be proud of.  “Go for it!”, when combined with the visual of an absurdly  dangerous activity,  made you smile.  When you kiss it off with the logo of Lempke-McKray  cemetaries and funeral services,  the immediate reaction is instantaneous giggling.  Well, that would be a human being’s reaction.   A lawyer…

”April, where does this lawyer live?  I mean, where’s his office?”

“I think his name is Steinholtz.  It’s Stienholtz and another name. ”

“I’ll look it up in the yellow pages.”

“The…?”

“Nevermind.  Before your time.”  I pulled out my iPhone and Googled “Stienholtz  lawyer, Minnesota and found “Steinholtz and Schwantz,  attorneys at law.  Workers compensation and accident/injury a specialty.”

“An ambulance chaser!”

April had stopped twirling her hair and her expression was something that might pass for concern.

“What are you going to do?”

There are time when people ask, “What are you going to do?” and sincerely want you to tell them your intentions.  This was not one of those times.

“Nothing,”  I lied.  “Nothing at all.”