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This ad is legen … wait for it … stupid. Legenstupid.

Written by: Erik Hagen

I don’t often mention this, mostly because of all the shame that I have related to it, but my day job when I’m not blogging for the Great Plains Examiner is in the field of advertising. That’s right. I’m like those guys on Mad Men, only without any of the drinking or the living in the 1960s or being awesome. I do kind of look like Jon Hamm though, as you can clearly see in the picture of the long-haired guy with the giant forehead next to this paragraph. I only mention this because I just want to clarify something for those of you who were aware of this fact prior to my having just mentioned it, and who have been sending me your IMs and messaging me on Facebook and Twitter and calling me on my telephone and sending me letters in my mailbox and telegraphing me from your telegraph machines in the early 1900s and the one guy who ever sent me a message via pigeon, which I admit to having been pretty cool, all of you collectively asking me “Dude, what in the heck?” This is my official statement on that matter, which is a very important matter indeed, and please stop calling me dude.

I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS AD. I DID NOT WRITE IT, THE AGENCY I WORK FOR DID NOT PRODUCE IT, AND I AM NOT THE SWEATY GUY WITH THE OPEN COLLAR APPEARING IN IT, ALTHOUGH I DO HAVE A BEARD SOMEWHAT SIMILAR TO THE GUY NEXT TO HIM, WHICH IS SOMETHING I AM NOW RECONSIDERING. REGARDLESS, I BEAR NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS AD WHATSOEVER.

I hope I clarified that to a sufficient level. If I could’ve done more than just the bolding and capitalizing all the words I just wrote, I would have, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make my fonts larger on WordPress yet.

That being said, there’s obviously a lot of bad things that can be said about this ad, and already have been by Boing Boing, and Bismarck-Mandan Blog, and In Forum, and The Blotter, and Say Anything, and North Decoder, and your mother the next time that you talk to her on the phone. The well of well-deserved criticism this ad has unleashed has already been sucked pretty dry, so if you would allow me to play Devil’s Advocate for just a moment.

Stupid game. Now what were we talking about?

I feel like nobody is rushing forward to tout the good points of this tourism ad. So, because I really enjoy being a contrarian, I’m going to put it upon myself to do just that. Here’s my full-throated defense of this terrible ad.

• As a North Dakotan, all I ever hear about these days from other North Dakotans is high-pitched whining about how our low levels of unemployment and general pleasantness to be around is bringing so many people out-of-state to live here and eat all our food, breathe all our air and steal all our automobiles. And now this ad comes along that actually encourages people not to come to North Dakota because of its lameness and you people are still complaining? WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO PLEASE YOU?

• One problem that gets mentioned a lot with the advertisements put out by the North Dakota tourism department in the past is their portrayal of North Dakota as a Western state. There’s cowboy hats and horses and spittoons and somebody playing a banjo in basically every ad that we’ve ever put out as a state. Now, for the very first time, an advertisement dares to portray North Dakota as a swinging, modern, liberal elite location where you can easily pick up groups of hookers through the window of the HoDo Lounge, and suddenly it all makes sense. Ah, so that’s why we weren’t ever doing that before! Suddenly everything makes sense to me!

• To be honest, all the negative neigh-bobs cluck clucking about the “sleaze” and “untowardness” on display in this ad are way more annoying to me than anything on display in the ad. Really? This is all it takes to offend you people? Dorky innuendos? Let’s try to get a little perspective here. Nobody’s cursing in this ad. Everybody’s wearing clothes (clothes from the 1970s, but still clothes). It’s not even readily apparent that anyone involved in the creation of this ad was aware that they were making any awkward connections to people having sex. But if you do need something to be offended by, it really should be the electric neon dork floating just above that one girl’s head. Because that is just gross, am I right?

• If you feel you really need to get your hate on about any of the North Dakota Arrive a Guest, Leave a Legend ads for whatever reason, this isn’t even the best candidate of the group. That, rather, would be this one:

I’ve run that line “Your new boots – spotted on a trail ride, at the rodeo and with horse momentos on the side” through my head at least several hundred times to this point, and I still have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. I mean, those are all English words as far as I can tell, yet grouped together like they are, it still makes no sense to me. I expect trying to figure it out will be giving me a brain aneurysm at any moment, so if this post just ends abruptly for no reason, that’s why.

And please, anyone, what in the crap is a “momentos” supposed to be? Because my spellcheck keeps actually yelling at me every time I try to write it. “Do you mean ‘moments’? Do you mean ‘mementoes’? Do you mean ‘monuments’?” I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY MEAN, SPELLCHECK! I DON’T KNOW!

Anyway, on the list of things that you should currently be enraged about, this geeky tourism ad is pretty darn far down on the list. Go outside and have a breath or two, because that is a thing you can do in North Dakota without dying, and everything will be better, I promise. There have been worse advertisements made in the history of the planet. Not a lot, but there have been. Repeat to yourself, this is not that bad of an ad. This is not that bad of an ad.

But again, I just want to stress, I did not have anything to do with making this ad in any way whatsoever. Just so you know.

Bismarck resident Erik Hagen is the author of the SodBlog and hopes that his having admitted to working in advertising doesn’t mean we can’t be friends still. Reassure him that being in advertising doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person at or visit his website at sodblog.com.

 

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Comments

  1. My theory is that they meant horse crap. But they thought it would be more tasteful to say “momentos” – even though that’s technically not a word. But that brings up another question: Do they really think telling everyone that they should come to our state and get some horse crap on the soles of their new boots is going to be appealing?

  2. It’s not terribly appealing, no, but it is truth in advertising.

  3. I think they may have also misspelled “soles.” I think they meant “souls.”

    • As a member of the ad community, I can assure you, we never mean to say souls, as we are not aware of what those are supposed to be.

  4. I attempted to work with ND Tourism about 20 years ago. They explained that they wrote their advertising material so as to appeal to an someone with an 8th grade intellectual level. It is nice to see they have finally entered the 9th grade.

    • That would go a great deal towards explaining their previous “I AM LEGENDARY! RU?” campaign.

  5. I understand that the “Leave a Legend” campaign is the underlying theme…that tag line with this photo was simply a BAD combination. Without the “leave a legend” text on this ad, you take a LOT of wind out of the critics’ sails. Even so, it’s not a great tourism ad.

    I’m a North Dakota Ambassador, and as such I think we’ve got far better things to promote than downtown night life. Even if one wants to dispel any perceived misconceptions that we don’t have any thriving metro areas, why not find a more family-friendly setting such as a unique restaurant or something with broader appeal? Who are we trying to attract to our state, and do we expect them to bring their families?

    We locals may tire of promoting things like Teddy Roosevelt’s sojourn here, but let’s not forget that we have something unique that people want to come and see. Despite North Dakota tourism’s inexplicable ad buys within the state, our campaign should be targeted at the tourists we wish to attact to North Dakota, not at the locals. If you want to encourage tourism within the state, Marketing 101 should tell you to generate a separate campaign for that separate objective.

    By the way, aren’t we telling local youths that there’s more to do around here than drinking? I sure am…I’ve been spinning that broken record since the 1980s. So now we have an ad touting the bar scene. Great.

    Hopefully this will cause some folks at ND Tourism and their favorite ad agency to step back and take a fresh look at some things. In that case, some good will have come from this blunder.

    Cf

  6. I find the ad in question not offensive but hilarious. I am shocked that none of the adults involved in its creation and production ever tilted their heads to the side, read the ad to themselves and thought, maybe, just for a second, that there’s a little sexual innuendo involved there. I’m no pervert, but it was glaringly obvious to me. However, the thing I think is the dumbest about the whole ad is that the photo could really be taken anywhere in the world. As someone who couldn’t give a crap about Fargo, I don’t recognize the bar, the street or the neon sign in the background. Looks like a stock photo to me.

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