Companies that like to aim high with their marketing are in luck. A quirky new device on the market, invented by a former magician named Francisco Guerra, can produce foamy clouds shaped like corporate logos. Or, as Guerra calls them, "Flogos." They reportedly can be as big as four feet across, be produced at the rate of one per 15 seconds, and travel up to 30 miles and as high as 20,000 feet. And at the machine-rental rate of $3,500 per day, it's cheaper than renting planes to pull banners or skywrite. Just think of the possibilities! Cool, huh?
I'm reminded, though, that not all in-your-face marketing necessarily creates a positive net result for the marketer. What reminded me of this was a report that Walt Disney World is planning to fill the air over the Orlando resort with Mickey Mouse-shaped Flogos.
In a former career incarnation, I was an editor for many years at publications aimed at business travel managers and corporate meeting planners. At every holiday (and I mean every one — major, minor, and made-up), we'd get in the mail gift baskets from Disney, filled with Mickey-themed items. The loot included candy, cookies, t-shirts, wind-up toys, dolls, office supplies, all manner of useless doodads, and sometimes elaborate contraptions that seemed to have no function whatsoever except to hammer you yet once more with Mickey's smiling face.
And what was the effect on we editors, who were human after all and thus vulnerable to the sway of marketing? Did we develop soft spots in our hearts for merry Mickey and delightful Disney? No. To a person, we were annoyed (albeit in a bemused kind of way). And the longer we stayed around the travel business, the more annoyed we got. If Disney was hoping we'd bend over backwards to do a nice story about the company, it sure didn't get its money's worth from the nonstop gift-basket blitz.
Disney will not rest until the earth is entirely Mickey-fied. I thought I was in a bad dream when, at the recent "CFO Rising" golf outing held at Disney's Magnolia Course in Orlando, we arrived at a par-three hole where the green was fronted with an enormous sand trap shaped like Mickey's head. I squinted at it for a few minutes, sighed a couple times, and hooked my shot way left.
By all means, rent a machine and start making Flogos. Just be sure to keep an eye out for the saturation point.
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