Life and Marketing: The One About the Shuttle Bus

It’s 4:15 am.  Columbus, OH.  Airport.  Shuttle bus.  12-humans and 19.5-bags in a 10-person shuttle bus.

It’s that time of day where humans who aren’t sleeping are in robotic zombie form vs. normal human form.

Ten of the twelve humans are.

But two of our twelve compadres are instead in full-go show mode.

You know when you’re in a group of people and two people are looking at each other and talking to one another — but the tone, amplitude and dramatization of their voices is actually talking to everybody else around them… for whatever reason.

The camoe’d-up, booted-up gentlemen is looking at his wife.  He’s saying words that seemingly should be intended for his wife.  But he’s doing it in a way where he clearly wants everyone else in our mini-bus to hear.

The other ten zombies internally roll their eyes with cynicism and drift back into 4:15am zombie-and-try-to-ignore mode.

P48 Marketing has what we call 10-Beliefs in Creating Funkadelically Awesome Advertising that works in our current ad-cluttered world.

Rule #1: If it sounds like an ad — feels like an ad — smells like an ad — or behaves like an ad… it sucks.

And let’s be real, this is arguably the hardest of our ten little rules to follow.  Because.  We’re freakin making ads.

We want our audience to buy.

We want them to love us.

We want to make money.

We want to become Swift-y rich.

We need to advertise our goodness, right?

And that’s all cool.  Let’s just do it in a normal human way.

Let’s show them our beauty — not awkwardly force it on to them.

Let’s not pretend they give a care about us.  Cause they don’t.  Until they feel something relatable about us first.

Once they do… we’ll tell them how we can solve their problems or make their day better.

Let’s just not do that at 4:15.  On a shuttle bus.  When – Where – and How they really don’t want to hear.

… Much love from p48
Craig