Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain (Marketing Magic)

Marketers are the Great and Powerful Oz!

In my formative years at Flynn, Sabatino & Day, a Dayton ad agency, I worked on Copeland Scroll Air Compressors.  These little suckers essentially looked like R2D2 - but in the industry, they were extraordinary!

We were responsible for many new product launches, but on one fateful day, I was amazed and astounded ... Not so much by this little metal R2D2 critter as by my creative team.  We were on an already extended deadline for a key trade pub for a full page ad that was going to announce the launch of our newest compressor technology.  The concept, copy and ad design were all approved and we were literally gathering the files to send to the publication at 5:00 the night of the deadline when it happened ...  The client called and said that they had just decided that our little black canister was going to launched in BLUE!  With no actual blue units produced and no time for a new photo shoot even if they had one, our only response was ... "What shade?"

Here's the amazing part.  Within an hour, we had a color sample from the client and the Mac Wizards magically transformed our black, shiny product into the new, (yet unproduced) compressor with the files ready to go to print.  All of the shadows and glare were in the photo - it looked like this blue beast really existed.

A few years later, while working on an international launch of the Scitex (now Kodak) VersaMark printer, we ran into a similar conundrum.  We had to include a machine in sales collateral that had not yet been produced.  Unlike our 10 pound R2D2 friend, this sucker filled a room ... existed only in prototype ... and had to be in sales materials in about a dozen languages and press releases in all major trade pubs.  Our answer ... "Lets build a model."

Through the power of styrofoam and wonder of photography, we had a quarter-sized model made and shot it to look like it's full-sized behemoth counterpart.  It was like dusting off the flux capacitor, gassing up the DeLorean and shooting into the future.

I learned early in my career that there is literally NOTHING that we can't do!  If we can pull off this type of magic with technical equipment, image what you can do with a checking account or auto loan!

As marketers - especially at credit unions and community banks - we can do some pretty amazing things.  We can give the gift of courage (or confidence), a heart (taking care of our communities), a brain (financial education) and home (mortgages).  

Our tactics may occasionally involve smoke and mirrors, but in the end we do great things.

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