Carmageddon. Sounds ominous, right?
This weekend, a portion of the 405 freeway is going to shut down for 53 hours. This may sound uneventful to a non-Angelino, but if you live in Los Angeles, the idea of closing a major artery in the already clogged heart of the city is akin to a complete shut down of the entire system.
On any given day, 500,000 vehicles pass through that section of freeway. So those 500,000 drivers will be displaced, traveling alternate roads and tilting an already fragile infrastructure into the crazy zone.
So, Los Angeles, the city of hypernews and gossip, did what it does best and created a genius marketing plan around the event. City officials have urged drivers to stay off the road. They asked people to stay in their neighborhoods for the weekend. People are planning block parties. Bars are scheduling pub crawls and offering $5 Car Bombs and Cadillac Margaritas. Celebrities are tweeting, "Stay off the roads!"
It just may turn out that all that manufactured fear will create less LA traffic than we'd experience any given weekend.
What marketing campaign strikes you as genius?
xoxo,
Suzanne
About Me
- Suzanne Casamento
- Author of Fingerprints, Choosing Tally, and All the Moments in Between. Tweet me @suzannecasamento
That's crazy -- both that they're shutting it down for so long and that they're telling people to stay home. I wonder what crazy things people will end up doing.
ReplyDeleteOne marketing plan that always struck me as genius was Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. I mean, seriously, how clever is having a book and film that gets you from Halloween all the way through Christmas? And then there's the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, which goes to what ... after New Years? Genius!
That's actually pretty cool! It will be good for the environment and stuff too. Anyway - really really cool!!
ReplyDeleteBlair Witch. Are they really missing? Is it a marketing scheme? OooooooEEEOoooo.
ReplyDeleteI really didn't know at the time.