I received an email this week from a friend of mine who’s been looking for a Medical Alert device for his grandmother which cracked me up. Not because old people falling are funny (it really isn’t) but it reminded me of a commercial when I was a kid for this old lady who’d fallen and couldn’t get up. Again, the commercial itself wasn’t terribly funny but the branding the phrase “help I’ve fallen and can’t get up” was brilliant.
See that’s the funny thing about marketing. It doesn’t matter that old ladies getting hurt is traumatic, without intending to do it the marketing professionals behind the Medical Alert device created a national pop culture movement that spread from late night TV to Saturday Night Live and had references on most popular culture shows of the time, that’s the aim of any budget marketer … the move the cost of advertising away from their own client and into the main stream media where brand recognition (even as the butt of a joke) is free