Since spreadsheet software attained critical penetration and the Great Digital Era of Workplace Efficiency began, Northern Westchester has suffered more casualties at the hands of New York ad agencies than from any other class of employer save, possibly, periodicals.
Now in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, former Madison Avenue consumer messaging experts are hunkered here in numbers that would make a propaganda minister green with envy.
Most have attempted reinvention.
A cursed (though blissfully proud) few have become showrunners, cinematographers, or directors. A few invested wisely. A few returned to the trust-fund teat. A few married well and re-oriented their client-facing energies.
Many pivoted to less remunerative but more socially rewarding pursuits like teaching, social work, local politics, and counseling.
Some decided to keep their income streams at their accustomed flow rates with in-house jobs at finance firms, Internet companies, real estate companies, and law firms.
Some ignored or defied the one-in-three odds and put up their own consultancy shingles.
Several ignored or defied the one-in-seven odds and started small businesses—restaurants, clothing stores, gift shops, bakeries, and galleries.
Several ignored or defied the one-in-two-thousand odds and tried their hands at acting, painting, sculpting, authoring, or music.
And very, very many of them remain underemployed. Which is how, every year, we are able to bring you the 100%-blowgrift-free Addie Awards—an expertly judged celebration of the most remarkable regional advertisements of the year.
Our judges get behind the graphics, beneath the slogans, and deep inside the hortatorial guts of northern Westchester’s best- (and worst-) in-class commercial communications.
Unfortunately, our panel’s stamina is not what it once was and they were only able to identify two winners for this cycle, both in the Direct Mail category.
At any rate, without further preamble—
2022 SINISTER SERVICE WINNER
MOSQUITO SQUAD “$50 OFF”
The Sinister Service award goes to the ad that does the best job making a service or product of dubious value seem like a Good Idea.
A side / B side
From the Addie committee:
This 8 ½ x 11” direct mail piece is a masterclass in first-time brand presentation. Not only does it expertly tick the two boxes (Is it intrusive? Does it correctly motivate?) of effective advertising, it explains a novel business concept with an emotionally viral simplicity.
The Squad is a yard fumigation service. Its workers arrive in shiny white, logo-affixed pickup trucks and proceed to wander your property with insecticide-belching leaf-blowers. “Fogging,” it’s called, even though part of the mist is traveling at 200 m.p.h.
But how to explain this in way that makes it seem like something for which you would fork over hundreds and ideally thousands of dollars a year?
How do you get into the mind of a homeowner in one of New York’s elite suburbs? How do you get champions of organic produce, native flora, sustainable energy, screen-limited children, greenwashing, and pollinator gardens to pay you to come spray poison around their split-level ranch with your 80-decibel, fossil-fuel consuming machines?
BIG UGLY BUGS!
In its training program back in the ‘90s, J. Walter Thompson described an effective advertisement as being one that throws a pie in the mark’s face and then, and only then—as the stunned victim wipes its eyes clean—only then does it impart something smart, clean, and quick that is both orienting and motivating.
The idea being that if you don’t get your audience’s attention, it does not matter how brilliant your pitch. The cutest, the funniest, the most retina-staining, the most ear-worming product testimonial in the world does you no good if nobody is paying you any heed in the first place.
You need to knock the cotton from their ears.
You need to melt the inch-thick glaze upon their eyes.
You need to drill through their habit-sclerotized forebrains.
If you don’t stop them, you can’t sell them.
You need to stab them in the heart and tell them they’re dead.
Because, if you don’t, it does not matter how clever you are. It is your message that is dead.
Set aside the banana cream—those two images, the mosquito and the tick—repeated on both sides of the ad for good reason, are the best pie filling imaginable.
No doubt due to biological programming (it is interesting to note no other phyla has killed more humans through history, perhaps we are wired to loathe them), insects and arachnids have power—visceral, undeniably motive power. And these bugs, especially at 20x life-size (the mosquito) and 60x (the tick), are just what the Mosquito Squad’s very talented ad doctor ordered.
But the shock won’t last long.
Even the most gifted commercial surgeon has only a moment to take advantage of the “Huh, what’s that?” and surgically supplant “Are there any bills in here?” with “You mean I can rid my property of these horrid things, can theoretically wander the quarter acre barefoot in my yoga shorts? Can have my not-at-all-gormless children roll around in the garden in nothing but their swim diapers? Can kiss all fear of Lyme’s and West Nile goodbye?”
So you plunge right in—the next biggest message (upper left, where the surburban eye has been trained to go since the moment it was released from Hooked on Phonics) is the reassuring, enticing “50% OFF.” Now the vic is thinking, “This seems like a young company. Look at that comic-book hero in the logo. And none of my neighbors has mentioned them. So maybe I’m at the cutting edge here—they could still be in their loss-leader pricing phase . . . and . . . and—see that: a 914 area code! Young AND local!“
With direct mail, it is smart to feature telephone number ahead of website or QR code. It suggests more humanity and, after all, if they’re looking at a piece of paper from their mailbox, they are obviously not plugged into the Internet. So you lean into the banner-free dirt-world physics and send them straight to the sales rep without them suspecting it’s an uncaring, number-taking national brand because, even if you don’t recognize the 914 area code, it says it right there—“LOCALLY OWNED & Operated!”
And that means?
Anybody? Anyone?
Yes, that’s right—we’ve got ourselves a franchise!
Franchising—modern America’s turnkey, pyramidal labor-exploitation system to insulate the brand owner from most of the effort, nearly all the risk, and 100% of the smelly hoi polloi! You get a hungry small business entrepreneur to come in, to buy in, to plunk down their life savings, to swear commercially optimistic fealty, to put up their sweat equity, and then have them pass you the lion’s share of the well-rinsed profits! Because, after all, without your I.P. Without your branding. Without your secret sauce, they’d be lost in the wilderness! They’d be struggling with a worn-out lighter trying to ignite the coals on their unlicensed hotdog cart! They’d be on their third bankruptcy in seven years! They’d be shuttling recycled sheet metal around in a shopping cart!
One used to apprentice and, as one learned one’s trade, eventually go on to take over the business, or start one’s own. But what kind of cuntry would we be if we passed on ideas for free?! Nothing wrong with apprenticing, so long as apprentices never stop being apprentices.
You can learn a trade, and we’re happy to teach it to you, but you can’t use it except while benefitting us! The hustle is yours. The rent payments are yours. The 80% of revenues are ours. Welcome to Indentrepreneuria[1].
But we digress. Step one for your local MOSQUITO SQUAD franchisee (after establishing financing for the up-front lump, the equipment deposits, the chemical subscriptions, the risk waivers, the lease, the NDAs) was doubtless to register a local telephone number to slot into the flyer template.
Because not only will the vic feel warm for employing a locally owned business, but they now see they are employing one that is a “proud supporter” of Peter Chernin’s (of Hartsdale, down in the south-central Neutral Ground[2]) Malaria No More!
Chernin, former editor at Warner Books, former president of (Fox) News Corp., former producer of the last decade’s Planet of the Apes reboots, runs a cause-based organization whose mission is to fight the most deadly bloodborn killer of humans globally, the malarial parasite.
We have no reason (other than for standard hypotheses related to public relations, and possibly an industrial interest in tropical deforestation) to suspect Malaria No More is not a legit and well-intentioned cause. We also have no idea if they know Mosquito Squad is using its logo in commercial contexts[3].
But it’s a terrific piece of shoulder-rubbing—the homeowner target now has every reason to suspect their fumigation dollars are not only killing invertebrate pests but are saving tropical non-pestilential tropical vertebrates—and bipedal ones that matter at that!
The ad is also expert for its simplicity. It teases custom flexibility—“Get the combination that works!” but doesn’t get lost in the weeds of whether you want the permanently installed system, the weekly versus the bi-weekly fog, or the particular chemical cocktail in which you wish to soak your property. You can figure that out when you call and talk to the sales rep who, you might rationally suspect, is sitting ten minutes away in Mt. Kisco, excited to hear your voice and looking out the window at the weather as opposed to having northern Westchester’s current conditions, some recent local headlines, and time zone blinking in the upper left corner of his teleprompt screen.
And most marks will also take comfort knowing it’s “America’s Original and Satisfaction Guaranteed Mosquito & Tick Control Since 2005.” Because these days there are indeed a lot of non-American companies out there. And a lot of places that will claim to be originals, but their originality only goes back a few years. Not like all the way back to 2005.
Finally, they also offer, on the B-side, a suggestion—under a clip-art green lauraceous leaf—that you ask about their “All-Natural Treatments.”
This gets to that tricky turn-it-over, fine-print-reading customer who’s worried about dousing their property with artificial chemicals but, at the same time, does not turn off the customer who is so anti-mosquito or -tick that they just want the strongest weapon available—be it from Dow or Dupont or Monsanto or Pfizer.
Because less than 5% of the population, even in our rarefied hamlets, will know that even natural treatments, pyrethrins et al., do not discriminate between arthropods and will assuredly kill[4] all resident butterflies, lightning bugs, hawkmoths, bees, praying mantids, ladybugs, and all other naturally occurring joint-legged, exoskeletoned critters to which people sometimes attach sentimental, and even practical, value.
Very smart of them not to get into those weeds.
Let fog sort them out.
An all-around A+. Congratulations.
2022 ROGER J. STONE WINNER
“WARNING! SOCIALISTS AHEAD!”
Named after John Jay High School’s loudest (and most pointy-headed) son[5]—and Lewisboro’s first seven-time federal felon—this award goes to the year’s piece of most outstanding political skullduggery.
Although it is only primary season, Assembly district 95—which includes The 914’s western (our region’s leftmost, at least when looking north) municipalities of Ossining, Peekskill, Cortlandt Manor, Ossining, the B.M.[6], Buchanan, Cold Spring, Croton-on-Hudson, and a portion of Yorktown—has three Democrat candidates locked in a fierce battle for the state seat no longer being occupied by the tenacious posterior of Ossining’s 15-term, 82-years-young Sandy Galef.
The three candidates are Dana Levenberg of Ossining, Vanessa Agudelo of Peekskill, and Colin Smith of Peekskill.
A side / B side
From the Addie committee:
It has been ages since we have seen so effective a political mailer. The genius of this piece hinges on the word “socialist,” which you might not think had so much power in the home district of John Reed, but the fact is the population here is 10% older than the rest of the state and has more voters over 50 than under.
For the clever political advertiser, this means a swing-vote-sized chunk that remembers the term as one of a handful of 20th-century fistfight-provoking playground insults, many of which are entirely frowned upon these days. (e.g., retard, pantywaste, stinkfinger, Polack, gaylord, dillhole, Pats fan). And it therefore (back to Thompson’s edict) elicits a visceral, stop-‘em-in-their-tracks reaction.
What kind of pie is it?
SOCIALIST CREAM PIE!
On seeing this ad, ten or fifteen thousand older northern Westchester and Putnam voters flashback to wedgies and locker-stuffings (suffered, witnessed, or given—it doesn’t matter) and, even if they cannot win a debate against a modern twelve-year-old as to why capitalism is better than socialism, it is safe to say you have their undivided.
Their adrenaline-dilated pupils are now wheeling across this black-and-white-and-red[7]-all-over flyer and the next thing that registers is “THREATEN PUBLIC SAFETY, DESTROY OUR COMMUNITIES!”
And then the nimble-fingered ad doctor jumps in with diamond-toothed trepan: “THREATENS OUR SAFETY By cutting the police budget by 50% and closing all jails, sending crime skyrocketing.”
It may not be a proper sentence (lacking a subject as it does), but slashing police budgets and closing all jails!? The reader is now kissing our seasonal leaf-blower ban goodbye and trying to think what the ensuing sign of the apocalypse will be . . . at least till the next darkly captioned tile descends upon her awareness—
“RUIN OUR NEIGHBORHOODS with legalized prostitution, decriminalized drug use, and overflowing trash.” Is the sanitation budget going to be slashed 50%, too? Or does the garbage pile come from the heroin- and crack-addicted prostitutes? (Those people of the night are such litterbugs. It only makes sense: they treat their bodies like that, why would we expect them to give an ounce of respect for our sidewalks and tulip-planted medians?)
And then the Satan 2 ICBM comes down—
“RAISE TAXES forcing New York tenants, homeowners and small businesses to pay more.”
For forty years taxes have been the ultimate suburban bunker-buster. Half-formed thoughts about the savings from half-sized police and sanitation budgets—to say nothing of revenue from taxable opioid sales—are out the window, blistered and blind, writhing upon the leaf-littered yard.
“This horrible Agudelo woman is going to raise taxes!? Does she not understand our portfolios are down massively right now?! Does she not understand we can barely afford our bi-weekly, off-the-books, house cleaners, our once-weekly yard service, and our twice-monthly (and regrettably on-the-books, because they’re a franchise) mosquito-and-tick abatement foggers?! And you can forget about us ordering dinner four nights a week, and going out two. We’ll go back to patronizing Costco like we did in the ‘90s.
“So, yeah, you can bet your ballot that small businesses are going to suffer—they’ll suffer right out of business! And don’t blame me. I obviously have nothing against giving cash to the people who tend my house and yard and belly.”
Powerful stuff, especially for District 95 residents.
Well done, Jeff Leb, Treasurer for Voters of New York, the PAC we know nearly as well as our neighbor two doors down.
Mr. Stone would be proud.
And, if his One-Term-Donnie-pardoned self had any part in it, we’re sure he is. Agudelo lost to Levenberg, Galef’s pick, by close to 10 points.
[1] Typically the indentrepreneur makes far more than the dilettentrepreneur, but surveys show the latter tend to be happier.
[2] The lawless region of Westchester below the Croton River and above the Bronx (Morrisania at the time) during the Revolutionary War. The Rebels were to the north and the Red Coats were in New York City.)
[3] We emailed to ask them but, as of press time, they have not replied.
[4] Big long footnote here.
[5] Stone grew up in Vista and was student-body vice president, then president of John Jay, also known locally for ”The Vagina Monologs” controversy of ‘07.
[6] Briarcliff Manor
[7] Apologies from our editor-in-chief.