Bad Advertising Ideas as Illustrated by Broken Glass in a Parking Lot

Occasionally, I write about common bad ideas or decisions that seem to be epidemic in advertising.  When I do, I give them names: 10K t-shirt problem,  or, Blue Curtains. Here's another one: Glass in a Parking Lot. 

Near our office in DC, there’s a parking lot.  A big, wide, open parking lot, like what you might find outside of a mall, or near a new sports stadium in the suburbs.  It’s the site of the old DC convention center, and conventional wisdom says it probably won’t remain a big wide-open parking lot forever, or even for a whole lot longer.  Still, apparently the city, or whoever owns the lot, understood at some point that this would remain a parking lot for a reasonable amount of time, so they dressed it up.  How they chose to do this, I find inspirational.  Inasmuch as it’s inspired this post about bad ideas.  Because the mistakes made in the parking lot are the same basic mistakes lots of people make when they’re creating ideas that have to work well in multiple media.

First thing to dress up the parking lot is this, um….thing.  It’s a hump, really, that runs the width of the lot.  Right in the center.  It looks like a train platform for some futuristic tram, or maybe the waiting area for a really big rental car return facility.  There's an architectural shelter, and the comfort of artificial turf to invoke a peaceful, green, plastic-y feeling.  I can’t figure out why this is here.  It doesn’t look bad.  It doesn’t look great.  It doesn’t do anything, at all, really, except provide artistic/architectural input in the middle of a parking lot, where, actually, not many people park.  Sometimes art doesn't need an explanation, or even a practical use.  I accept that.  Sometimes there is some art displayed on this thing.  I’m not sure anyone goes to see the art up close.  I’m convinced this is the project of an environmental installation artist who, somehow, was able to convince some committee of city bureaucrats that this hump thing would make the parking lot look like, I dunno, a more artistic parking lot.  Maybe it succeeds.  Maybe I’m cynical.  Maybe not.

However, what’s nice about the ridge of the hump is that there’s a walkway set into the artificial turf.  This is good, assuming you have a need to walk where it’s going (note: almost no one has this need).  The walkway itself is made of tiles. The tiles are made of broken glass, firmly embedded in concrete. They’re nice looking.  They’re well constructed.  They’re artistic.  But they’re also the beginning of the downfall of this parking lot.

Because, you see, someone, somewhere, liked this broken glass idea enough that they thought it should be used, not only as a walkway – but as divider strips in the actual parking area of the parking lot.  Broken glass.  As decoration.  In a parking lot.  This is a bad idea.

As I've mentioned, few cars actually park in this parking lot.  That’s because there is broken glass, literally, everywhere.  Instead of embedding the stuff in tiles, away from tires, they sort of glued it to drainage depressions (ok, they're shallow gutters) that run the length of the lot.  The glue (or whatever) didn't hold.

This broken glass thing is an idea that comes from someone who has never changed a tire in the rain. Or at all, probably.  This is an idea that is based not in the least in functionality, or, really, in reality.  This is an idea that comes from thinking that says:  “It looks great in application A, so it’s bound to look great in application B!”    Broken glass tiles in a sidewalk are artistic.  Broken glass strips in a parking lot are moronic.  Here’s a city where traffic is hell, parking is at a super-premium, and there’s a GIGANTIC parking lot that nobody uses for parking -- because it’s littered with broken glass.

Which brings me to advertising, and the way some people try to shoehorn ideas for one thing into another thing.

Your 30 second spot was made for TV.  That doesn’t make it good for the web, too.  It might be great.  Or it might be broken glass.  I'm not saying it's one or the other.  I'm saying it’s not automatic, and you have to look at it critically, and with a detailed knowledge of both media, to know.  Ditto, your poster or your print ad.  Ditto, going the other way, your landing page, or your social network strategy.

The definition of a campaign is a group of messages, across several media, that work together.  It’s not just doing the same thing everywhere.  Sometimes it’s not appropriate to do the same thing in one media as another.  Billboards rarely make great TV spots.  Posters rarely make good sites.  Sites and banners are not just different sizes of the same thing.

Sometimes things translate directly.  But more often than not, ideas need the breadth to accommodate different executions for different media.  In turn, those executions must feed a larger whole.  Just looking the same isn’t enough – in fact, it isn’t actually required, in every case, or increasingly, in most cases.  The second requirement is that they work together.  The first is that they work, period.

Advice of the day: Don’t put broken glass in a parking lot.  Even if it looks great on the sidewalk.

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Comments

[Chad]

I have always wondered if that walkway may have been a make good to the Hyatt who lost their ability to market themselves as being across from the convention center. Now they can tout this nice covered walkway that gets you halfway to the new site. Still the glass is perplexing...although my 4 year old enjoyed playing with it.