Thursday, August 19, 2010

For the third time in two weeks, my mailbox played host today to a curious marketing campaign, a series of large postcards drawn in the style of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It wasn’t children’s literature that was being pushed, however, so much as church, with “Diary of a Wimpy Christian” splayed across the front of the slickly produced ad. On the back, there was an exhortation to “find purpose and meaning in every moment” of my life, ostensibly if I acted now and decided to visit this particular church on Sunday.

The purpose and meaning I discovered immediately after reading the postcard was, well, to shred the postcard purposefully and meaningfully. It wasn’t addressed to Current Resident or The Potentially Lost, after all, but to me, and I began to wonder how my info even ended up on this mailing list. Then came the harder questions. Should church be advertised? Existentially speaking, could this ever be a hell of an ad campaign? How would marketers at this church measure performance? On number of souls acquired? Or, even more cynically, perhaps it was simply a matter of subtracting cost of mailing, snacks, and normal wear on pew fabric from incremental tithed revenue.

There is tension here, in other words, and at a certain juncture the lure of being hip and current ran the good ship sense aground, and suddenly the parishioners were praying to Our Lord and Savior and Chief Marketing Officer Jesus Christ. And when your campaign borrows from existing media so earnestly, is it still fair use? Could it be plagiarism? Stealing, which thou shalt not do? It’s, like, if you’re really compelled to market the Sabbath, get some fresh material at the very least. For unto you an original thought is given. Go forth and copy no more, all of your days!

Perhaps it’s a matter of waiting for the right creative to hit. Say there were a pamphlet devoid of graphical flourish and adorned with a single line of text:

Hey, shithead. If you’re not too busy this Sunday, you may want to make your bi-quarterly visit.

I would rejoice. And respond. But such collateral will never come to pass, which means I’ll have to settle for the inevitable postcard based on the Twilight series that sparkles in the sunlight just so.