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.