The totally unrelated power of the marketing balloon.

What a splendid idea. S.T. VanAirsdale at The Reeler Blog has created a Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon in which film blogs have been challenged to throw off the shackles of film blogging and write about something completely different.

Marketing messages are absolutely subjective. Marketers, of course, would have you believe otherwise, because it’s our job to create communications that are designed to appeal to the largest group of everyone, for everyone to enjoy, believe, subscribe to and be moved to tangible and demonstrative action upon consumption. But it’s not earth-shatteringly complex to suggest that not every piece of marketing will speak to every member of its intended audience.

But I see things each day that I know have been created for marketing purposes, but which appear to have no true logical purpose or intent.

Take, for example, the conversion power of a marketing balloon. You can totally understand how this works in the context of McDonald’s. You’re out driving your minivan with your three adorable and playful children sitting in the back. Speeding through a yellow light, you come upon a McDonald’s that has a massively inflated Ronald McDonald sitting on top, beckoning to your children. It’s colorful and fun; it’s corporate branding come to life and your children succumb to it. “Daddy, look! There’s a big Ronald McDonald balloon! Hee hee! Please buy us a Happy Meal© and we promise we won’t cry and kick and swear and pout and ruin your day off if you please please just buy us some fast food right now or else and are you turning yet and - “

And you do turn into the parking lot. And you do hand over your money. And you are satisfied - of a kind - because of it. The marketing balloon has fulfilled its purpose.

But how do we apply that strategy when it comes to the U.S. Marine Corps?

I’ve seen these tethered to the roofs of Marine recruitment offices, balloony arms folded and stern visages gazing downward upon the parking lot. How does this thing appeal to its target audience exactly? Do would-be recruits, on their way to the dry cleaners’ or haberdashery, walk by and think “Dum de-dum de-dum, I’d better get going on these errands and I should really decide if I’m going to join the Marines today and oh my goodness, look at that balloon! Wow! I totally wasn’t sure that I wanted to be sent off to bootcamp to learn how to kill people and break things! Now that I’ve seen that big, angry-looking Marine balloon, I’m so there! Boo-ya!”

Please don’t misunderstand. I admire and respect anyone who joins the Marines, and I have absolutely nothing against doing so. It helped make my own dad into the man he is, and he’s a hell of a fine fellow. I just can’t understand what the message is supposed to be here, what the utility of the marketing balloon is in this context. Spending the money and effort on deploying such a thing just runs counter to whatever I’m supposed to understand about how marketing works.

Stirring recruitment Michael Bay-esque mini-movies, I understand. Big, bouncing angry Marine inflatables - not so much.