Advertising the Land Of Enchantment
New Mexico’s Newest Alien Needs to Go Back to his Planet
By Emily Esterson, 4-19-07
We just can’t let go of our little green Roswell alien. Only now we have a newer, pointy-headed version with a long tail and springy feet. Is this the alien a la Bill Richardson, who’s dying to let the world know that we’re all about space here in New Mexico?
Is “The Best Place in the Universe, New Mexico, Earth?” Saatchi Advertising and the State of New Mexico Tourism Department want you to think so, but they show you only one small photograph of a mountain with some green (??) in the foreground in the newest state tourism campaign. Check out the video below.
The campaign launched on April 14 in the Southwest, San Diego and Minneapolis. The TV spot campaign actually looks like a cross between the the movies “Office Space” and “2001 Space Odyssey,” with its old-style “computery” typeface and its B-movie sci-fi aliens. We don’t see the state, we don’t see anything about New Mexico that makes it unique. We don’t even see the Spaceport (and good thing, too, since it’s a strip of asphalt in the desert. Now that’s impressive.
And the website is even worse: The front page looks like it might have been designed by a middle-school sci-fi geek. Click on www.newmexicoearth.org. There’s that ugly typeface again, next to which is the rotating New Mexico cam pictures of sunflowers and um...speedboats...as if we are noted for our plethora of water sports. But click on the links, and we’re “transported” (thanks to some equally dated audio files--can you say, “Danger, Will Robinson!") in the New Mexico State Department of Tourism website which looks as it always has.
Nothing about this space theme works in my opinion. Not one darn thing.
Call me a traditionalist, but when you have wonderful skies and red canyons and incredible art and stunning architecture, why would you focus your visuals on ugly aliens in an office setting?
Recall a couple of years ago when we wrote about the convoluted process for choosing this disaster. The shenanigans surrounding that choice of Saatchi and Saatchi may have reflected Richardson’s desire to have a brand-name ad agency to brand New Mexico, rather than choose some smaller, or heaven forbid, local agency that a) thinks $3 million is big contract and would devote a lot of attention and creative energy to it or b) may know the state, and what the state wants to project as its image, better than some guys in San Francisco. We wrote back then that $3 million is paltry pocket change for an agency so large, and that we likely wouldn’t get the attention or the quality we would like. Indeed, it looks like that’s true. Some of the firms in the running back then included the company that created the very successful and unforgettable, “What happens here, stays here” campaign for Las Vegas, the Virginia is For Lovers campaign, and even the fantastic graphics for the RailRunner commuter train (sadly, Rick Vaughn who created that image died recently of cancer. RIP.)
Huw Griffith, CEO of M&C Saatchi, which is based in Los Angeles, told the New Mexico Business Weekly his firm is very proud of the campaign. “It’s yet another example of our brutally simple thinking and creative hard sell,” he says.
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