Features
Tours de Farce: The Adman Cometh
But I just got out of a Pollstar.com inter-departmental staff meeting. Our employers want to spend the big bucks and come up with an advertising slogan that we can run on the Super Bowl. The problem is, no matter how hard we tried, none of us could come up with a slogan that would satisfy our new advertising director, Mai Kee, let alone speak for Pollstar.com.
We spent hours brainstorming in an effort to create a snappy slogan that would immediately remind the viewer that Pollstar.com is the place where you can let your fingers do the walking for tour info on big acts like Sting, Van Morrison and Duran Duran. However, try as we may, we just couldn’t bring good things to life.
We’re loaded to the gills with dates for Ani DiFranco, Little Charlie & The Nightcats and John Pizzarelli, and we need more than just a catchy phrase. Mai Kee says our slogan has to be good like a dot-com should, that it should actually reach out and touch someone. Mai Kee wants a slogan that takes a licking and keeps on ticking, that’s good to the last drop, something that says, “we’ll leave the light on for you.” If only we could knuckle under and just do it.
But we’re tour date specialists, not Madison Avenue flimflammers. While we like to think Pollstar.com is a different type of company, we realize that the subject is concert data, and you can’t always have it your way. Even though we have dates for Guitar Shorty in San Diego and Stacey Earle during February, we just can’t sit on our laurels. We have to keep going and going and going.
So while we spend this week updating schedules for bands like Social Distortion and KISS, we’ll continue to try to come up with an advertising slogan for Pollstar.com that will please Mai Kee. A slogan that will snap, crackle and pop with originality. Because no matter how many phrases, cliches and sayings we suggest, we know we won’t be finished until we can honestly say, “Hey look, Mai Kee likes it.”