I’m tired.
How the hell am I going to be ready to get on a plane tomorrow?
I really should respond to the emails from B, S, Iv, D, J, H, SB, Is, E, L, A, and M.
Maybe I should set an alarm for the morning.
Only 1100 words to go. I could nail that down tonight. Er, this morning.
I’m tired.
I just read an intersting article on msnbc about a controversial ad campaign by the tourism commision of NM. It involves aliens (think Roswell), and sounds funny. Apparently it is thought to be beneath the “high” culture NM should be selling. Whats funny to me is the article mentions that so far the ad has played in two places with direct flights to NM: San Diego (sure, makes sense) and Minneapolis?!?! What the heck? The green chile, hockey corridor? They’re all out of adobe sheds for their ice fishing? Mary tyler Moore just needs a ‘rita as big as her head?
They’re advertising directly to expatriates me (SD) and my brother (Mpls). Mystery solved.
TTIUWL
article:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jDI_0ZT-r9f3i36ZN6UsDvYbQb6QD8T5HQH80
TV Commericals:
http://www.newmexicoearth.org/
Personally, upon seeing the commercials locally, my first impression was, “Cool, NM is spending big bucks; they must really be in the big leagues now.” My second was, “Is that all you got?”
Best Place in the Universe = boring, uninspiring slogan.
Which brings us inevitably to the Mr7K suggestion: let’s hold a MR&HBI contest to help the poor, misguided NMex Tourism Board come up with a more inspiring slogan for New Mexico tourism than “The Best Place in the Universe” (and a corresponding add campaign as well, naturally).
We can charge far less than the $5 mil , and of course the money would go to Jerry’s tourism budget.
Ready, set, ideate!
New Mexico: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Commercials feature Steve Martin and John Candy extolling NM’s aviation history (and hot air balloons), narrow gauge trains, and Route 66. Strangely, John Candy’s lips never move during commercial.
New Mexico: The Original Burning Man
Film of Zazobra
We’ve been Potheads for a thousand years
Scenes of Bandelier, Chaco Canyon, and Maria Martinez.
Have you seen the design for the New Mexico quarter? I was hoping for an alien but instead it has the boring outline of the state’s boundaries and a zuni. Ooh, the outline of the state! I’ll bet no other state does that. I mean c’mon people! You had since 1999 to get a decent design and this is the best that you can do?
/that said, Iowa state quarter.
//Worst. Design. Evar.
They should have just put a giant eight on the back. That would be one damn fine quarter.
At the very least, there should have been a yucca and a roadrunner. Looks like New Mexico will take the award for least inspiring quarter. We can’t even score for originality, since Texas put the state map outline with the Lone Star on it.
Where the heck is the green chile?!?
following up on Keith’s ideate mandate:
Nouveau riche Nouveau Agers
Come discover New Mexico after rich post-hippies discovered it and turned it into one giant Art Gallery no local could afford. Cleanse your Chakras with a $900 green mud mask at 10,000 Chamisas Spa, then fill your belly with pino and green chile encrusted chunk of Kobe Beef imported with the entire carbon footprint of people born in NM since 1950.
Virgin New Mexico!
Richard Branson bought it! Yep, the whole damn state. Now come enjoy his vision: Virgin Enchantment! (offer not open to those who are not wealthy adrenalin junkies.)
Come see Areas 1-50, too!
A natural transition away from the alien theme. State tourism boards like to divide their states up into different regions and extol the benefits of each suddenly autonomous fiefdom. Well, come up with 50 things (we’ve got nearly a dozen in this commmnt thread already) and randomly assign them around the state.
…and to tie the two themes in this thread together in one unified field theory:
New Mexico: 5th in size, 46th in seniority, last in monetary design.
But first in the hearts of green chile-cheeseburger lovers!
Looks like we need to charge up the Miata some more. It’d been running it in the driveway, but apparently not long and often enough. So, I got to do some extra walking today to fetch the poor leaky Expedition to come to the Miata’s rescue.
Keith – thanks for the links to the commercials. I got a chuckle out of them. Not sure why they are so controversial. Out here we get a lot of ads for Texas. They are not risk takin glike the alien ads, and I have to admit they do a good job. The TX ads generally run on a theme of the unexpected, i.e. think TX is all about oil and cowboys? and then bam they’ll show a 5 star restaurant in a classical greek setting or something like that.
WHat we need is for fuego to make a 5 second spoof of the alien tourism ads…
In New Mexico, no one can hear you scream
Genuis!
I think the issue is that the commercials could be for any where. It is an ad campaign that where at the end you are talking about the aliens, not the destination spot. That and it is such a rip off of the “Alien” franchise, which is all about scary and gross and aggressive. They might have gone the ET route, but then the “Aliens are just 9-5 workers like us” chuckle angle doesn’t work.
But again, here we are talking about the aliens, not New Mexcio, which by my understanding of Madison Ave makes it a successful ad campaign for the agency, but not so much for the customer.
New Mexico: Come see what attracted DH Lawrence, O’Keeffe, and Oppenheimer and drove away Jerry, Jesse, Bob and Keith.