Most Defaceable MBTA Ad Campaign of 2005: “The Pulse of Boston”
Let’s just get my first and last “best of” list out of 2005 out of the way right now, before the avalanche starts next month, shall we?
The only award I’ll be giving out this year is for the Most Defaceable MBTA Ad Campaign of 2005. This handily goes to the Boston Globe’s “The Pulse of Boston” campaign. Most of the ads feature large thought balloons featuring one locally-oriented question. When someone is sitting under them, they look like they’re coming out of the T-rider’s head. I cede them points for cleverness on that front. But the fact that they’ve broken the fourth wall of advertising by directly using riders as props seems to empower people to write all over them, with what’s really on their minds. Well, the great big empty space right under the questions probably doesn’t hurt, either.
Here are my favorites.
Globe: Will the B.U. Terriers do well this year?
Graffiti: This is the Red Line. Why should we care?
Globe: President Romney? Governor Romney? Mr. Romney?
Graffiti: PRIVATE ROMNEY
Globe: Gillette, Hancock, Reebok… Who’s next to be sold?
Graffiti: Damon
The Dig, admittedly a biased critic in this instance, also has some more biting criticism of this campaign:
The campaign, which touts the Globe as “The Pulse of Boston”—not the finger on the pulse, mind you, but the town’s actual, throbbing pulse—puts a Rovian spin on the paper’s increasingly worrisome credibility problems.
…
On October 24, the Living/Arts page demonstrated its unique understanding of local youths with this fascinating exposé of urban subculture: “Ask college students for the time, and you’ll have to wait a few minutes as they rummage through their purses or backpacks to find their time-telling device: the cellphone.”Oh, snap! The Herald don’t tell you that kids don’t use watches no more! Who’s all up in your pulse now, Boston? What what?
And while we’re ragging on the globe, Bostonist points out that boston.com is actually losing readers. I am not one bit surprised about that. It’s an utterly clueless web site from pretty much every angle.
UPDATE: Universal Hub links to another great example:
Globe: Where’s Whitey?
Graffiti: The Suburbs.
December 30th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
Too bad that person was right about Damon.
May 3rd, 2006 at 11:26 am
I should have taken a look at the date of that Bostonist blog entry before I wrote my embarrisngly disjointed reply. It was an old blog entry that essentially pointed out a traffic anomoly, and not a continued trend.
Each month, Nielson/Netratings writes up a summary of the year over year statistics. The study referenced was measuring October 2004 (the month that the Red Sox one the world series) to October 2005 (a month of nothing much special happening.) Boston.com posts their monthly page views and unique visitors and you can see the traffic spike that the 2004 World Series caused.
I think to keep the pace of traffic growth that they saw in 2004, they’d need the Boston area not only to get better teams that can win more championships, but I think they’d even need to have more professional sports for people to follow.