Advertising Campaigns

This classic Battleship game has been kept in mint condition at camp in Pagosa for... it looks to be a LOT of years. I've been meaning to take a picture for a post and each year I forget. But finally, I remembered.

I love happy mom and daughter who are thrilled to be washing the dishes with the added enjoyment of watching Dad and son play Battleship.

In advertising you advertise to your target market. Does this mean the dads are the ones who bought the board games in a typical 50's family? Or were moms so desperate to have husbands spend time with their sons that doing dishes while the men and boys played games seemed like a wonderful idea? And how does daughter feel about all this? Were girls unwelcome to play Battleship? Was it considered a violent war game only for boys and big-boys -- like Halo of today? What year did they change the box design and decide it was a bad idea? So many questions...I think I need to do some internet research...

In other marketing news...


Just today I pulled this pencil from a basket in the library at my children's elementary school. I've had several stints of vegetarianism over the years but have ultimately decided if I buy it organic most of the time and don't think about how ill-treated the cows and animals are the other times, I'm okay with eating meat. I do take issue with the marketing practices of the meat (and milk) industry and the desperate advertising tactics of promoting the "need" to eat meat and drink milk by sending propaganda to the schools and trying to teach kids there's a "meat" food group and a "dairy" food group, blah, blah, blah... Mention they're learning about the food pyramid in 2nd grade and my kids get a big lecture on the advertising evils of the meat and dairy industry and how they try to trick people and ACTUALLY it's a "protein" group with a lot of choices for getting protein and there are a lot of ways to get calcium -- not just from milk. I can go on and on...

But this pencil just cracked me up and you know I want to make little "Beef Gives Me Zip!" flags for toothpicks to poke into each individual steak next time we serve it.


Finally...



Perhaps it was the seductive beef marketing campaign tool I was using to write with today, but when I came home, I gave in to the temptation to try Vienna Sausages. They've been sitting in the cupboard since Marty's scout camp when I had to buy a sampling of every canned meat and fish product to see which ones he wanted to take on his hike.

When I was a teen, my mom babysat 1-year-old Mason. Mason's mom always packed him vienna sausages in a babyfood jar. Since my mom wears a shield of skepticism when it comes to advertising (and also majored in child development AND nutrition), she was never sucked into the health claims of the 1970's meat industry and never bought us processed meat. Never did we open the fridge or cupboard to find vienna sausages, bologna, hot dogs, or shelf-life spam. Never did she pack our lunches with a ring of Oscar Meyer Bologna with it's cool pull-off red tape and a slice of Kraft Cheese Singles, self-contained in their own saran wrap with a couple of pieces of Wonder White Bread to go with it. It was always 100% whole wheat (ground in our own kitchen) with natural peanut butter or dye-free monterey jack cheese sandwiches for us.

Needless to say, I was always oh so tempted by Mason's jar of vienna sausages and when no one was looking I'd quickly and carefully take the lid off the jar, snatch the middle sausage, tuck it in my hand and dash to some uninhabited corner of the house to devour my processed sausage in secret.

So now, after a month of the vienna sausages sitting in my pantry and knowing I really have to be too old to actually like them, I decided to break open the can anyway and find out. Yikes! One soft bite (what I recall to be the texture of liver) and I'm officially cured from the desire to ever eat a vienna sausage again.