Hey you... BEND OVER

Hey you… BEND OVER!

Sometimes advertising coaxes its target audience.

Sometimes it begs, seduces or even threatens the intended audience to sell a product.

On the odd occasion, to my delight, advertising will slap you upside the head, knee you in the groin and throw you down a flight of stairs to get your attention. You gotta admire spunk.

Why would someone have to take such drastic measures?

Well… someone would have to do this when the target audience is very resistant to the product or service that is being promoted. The message I’m referring to in this blog is ‘long life and good health’.  Yup, someone is selling ‘long life and good health’ but the target audience (men) isn’t interested. In their minds, someone is selling them ‘a finger up the ass’. Naturally, the only way to get through to these guys is to take their childish fears and anxieties, stomp on them and throw them right back in their face to show them how foolish they are.

Enjoy.

The Encounter

At 5 AM one July morning in 2007, I awoke to the sounds of my daughter screaming. I flew down the stairs to her room on the main floor and found her sitting up in bed, staring at the foot of the bed and still screaming.

She was yelling that someone had grabbed her foot. A quick search of the room confirmed that no one was hiding in the closet or under the bed. The alarm was still set. No one had entered or left the house. At the time, my daughter was 17;  she had always been very responsible and we had no reason to believe that she was lying.

She recounted the story for my wife and I. A few moments before the incident, she had woken up and was lying in bed on her back, relaxing. Suddenly, she felt a distinct pressure on her right foot. At first she wasn’t alarmed because she thought it might be her cat, Mozart, reaching up and pulling on her to get her attention.  Mozart often slept in her room and let her know when he needed to leave. What my daughter didn’t know was that Mozart was in our room at the time. When she sat up, intending to shoo him away, there was nothing there. She could still feel the firm pressure pushing on her foot, but there was no cat clinging to her. In fact, it felt like a human hand was holding her foot and when she started to scream, it let go.

My daughter was so convinced that this wasn’t her imagination, she didn’t sleep in that room for several weeks.

This is why we believed her.

When we first moved to our current neighbourhood, we lived in a smaller house just down the street. Over the years, we got to know Mark and Sandra in the ‘big white house’ down the street. They had made a number of improvements to their house including the addition of a large back porch and a bedroom for their oldest daughter. We always admired their house and when Mark got a job offer in the states, they offered it to us before they listed with a realtor.

Two years after we moved in, we received a phone call informing us that Mark had been killed in a plane crash. The crash happened in June, 2007, one month before my daughter’s paranormal encounter.

For the first few weeks, none of us spoke about our thoughts concerning the encounter; we didn’t want to make it more ‘real’. But when we did start discussing it, we all had the same feeling. If there is such a thing as spirits, it would make sense that Mark would be drawn back to the house he lived in for so long… to a room that he had built for his oldest daughter. If the essence of the person we knew was suddenly ripped from his corporeal existence in a violent crash, he could be forgiven for being confused and returning to the wrong home. He probably felt it was his daughter he was reaching out to, in a comforting sense to let her know he was there.

Although she always believed that the encounter was not hostile, my daughter was uncomfortable returning to her room. I had to sleep there for a few nights to show her that the ‘haunting’ had passed. I have to admit though, for the first night, I kept my feet away from the end of the bed.

Eventually, my daughter resumed sleeping in her room again, and to the best of our knowledge, Mark has never returned. 

Recently, we had another bizarre experience with more sinister overtones, but that’s a story for another time.

Out of respect for our friends, their names in this story were changed. However, all other facts in this story were recounted as accurately as possible.

Hey... catch this!

My mind is reeling with old adages to get this started.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Don’t tell them how it works… show them.

Wash your hands before you eat.

If you keep making that face, it’ll stay that way.

Okay, that last one has nothing to do with this blog, but it’s memorable for me because it was the comment that made me realize my parents may not have been 100% truthful with me for the first five years of our relationship.

Is truth stranger than fiction?

Probably not.

Is it scarier than fiction?

Maybe.  

The people who marketed the movie Contagion realized that the premise of the movie was grounded in some truths that we all take for granted.

We are surrounded by germs.

They grow.

They can do bad things to humans.

The genius of this campaign is that they didn’t just tell the movie-going public, they decided to show them. And, with the beauty of a good viral video, they didn’t just impact people who passed the sign on the street.

Sadly, the video didn’t get the attention it deserved. When I watched it, there had been just over 357,000 views. I’m not sure what they used to get people to the video, but it deserved a better fate. Maybe the germ threat didn’t resonate with the heavy user younger demo. Maybe they prefer their horror to be masked and wielding a chain saw.

Check it out… and then, go wash your hands.

This was the ad they should have made 20 years ago.

Why is this ad effective? It's incredibly well done, it totally sells the product and it reinforces the brand. Really, I could go on, but less is more in this case. I can't even tell you the name of the product because it will ruin your enjoyment of the ad.

Tell the person who holds your calls to hold your calls (I wish I had someone who could hold my calls) click on the rather ungainly link below and give yourself 90 uninterrupted seconds of pleasure. 


http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=22984504&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=1&loop=0

A tribute to my dad on his birthday

It's odd that some things which should be obvious remain obscure until you've experienced them for yourself.

When I was in my mid thirties, my wife, Jill, gave birth to our daughter, Alexa. I loved being a parent and discovering the simple but incomparable joy of holding my baby girl. 

Four years later, we had our second child, Ben. As I held him for the first time and felt him snuggle into me, I remember thinking that I should enjoy this feeling while it lasts. Boys don't hug their dads once they hit their teens... at least that must be what I believed as I hadn't hugged my dad since I was twelve.

Sluggishly, the cerebral gears began to turn. Well, why didn't I hug my dad? Who stopped it? Me or him? Was there some unwritten rule about two men hugging?  It was something I hadn't even thought about as the father of a girl. It was perfectly acceptable for a dad to hug his daughter no matter what age they were... but somehow I had been secretly harbouring the belief that sons and dads didn't hug.

However, after only knowing my son for a few minutes, I was certain beyond any doubt that I would want to hug him whenever I felt like it for the rest of my life.

That was when the epiphany happened. A creeping realization slowly dawned on me that I might not be the first dad in the world to feel this way.

In fact, it might even be possible that my dad felt the same way about me.

I was only months away from turning forty, which meant that I probably had gone more than twenty-five years without giving my old man a hug. It wasn't something that had happened intentionally, but it had happened none the less and I resolved to put my new theory to the test. 

A few weeks later, we had a family event at my house. When it began to wind down and my father was about to leave, I followed him to the front door. After he put on his shoes and coat, I stepped forward and gave him a hug. A simple hug.

For one brief moment, he reacted as if I'd jumped out from around a corner and startled him. His body flinched, then he hugged me back. Fiercely. I thought he was going to crack one of my ribs and I couldn't help but wonder if he had been waiting all those years for my permission to hug again. 

Today, my son is closing in on eighteen. He's a man in his own right, and he good-naturedly endures my random hug ambushes. Cherished friends and co-workers are also included in my spontaneous displays of affection. 

And naturally... whenever I see my dad, I give him a hug goodbye.

It seems like a small thing, and I'm sure most people take it for granted but if I hadn't had a son of my own, I wonder how long it would have taken me to realize that my dad was patiently waiting for a hug from his son.

Happy Birthday, Dad.