Marketing Departments, Are You Okay?
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Humor, Satire, Marketing, Coronavirus, Advertising

Marketing Departments, Are You Okay?

Blink if You Need Help.

Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

A delivery man wearing a mask brings a package to someone’s house. He’s smiling. He drops off the package. Disinfects it. Sets up a little cardboard stand. Puts the package on top. Puts a crown on the package. Goes back to his truck, covers himself with disinfectant.

He even puts some on his mouth like lip gloss. Then he says:

“I feel so super duper safe working! It’s like, 110% safe! The safety is of such a maximum level, that I’m in better health now that I’m working! My diabetes has been cured. It went away the minute I stopped collecting unemployment. So you see, I don’t need a union, because of the extreme safety and high quality of life offered by my employer! Please continue ordering things! Do not in any way stop buying things online! I love my job. If I could talk in emojis, you would just see tiny hearts floating out of my mouth!”

Well, that’s not at all strange. The sunny day. The van on the open road. The cheeriness.

The complete and absolute disregard for, you know, reality.

The escapism and unnatural assurances of ads make me wonder —

Marketing Departments, Are You Okay?

Are you, like, actually trying to signal to us that you’re being held captive in some advertising campaign from hell? I imagine your assignments look something like this:

show a man working. hispanic, but not like, too hispanic. speaks english well. one of the good ones. but he could be white, even. he is so happy to work. maybe throw in there that he doesn’t really need a union rep because we are taking all precautions necessary. encourage people to order things they don’t need. maybe those unicorn inflatables? people love unicorns, right? maybe we can set up a fake twitter for him, too. people can follow him for fun! follow his adventures, and see just how safe and happy he is! something like that. oh, and promote the new crowns that come with every delivery, because we want our customers to feel like royalty. studies show that when people think they are rich, they spend more money. especially if they found out in a DNA test that they have a connection to royal ancestry. not sure where this data came from. do not fact check. please discourage going on unemployment. we want that government money for us.

I imagine you look at this assignment with all the horror of an empathetic human being with a liberal arts degree but hey, you want to keep your job. You see how racist, out-of-touch, and potentially deadly this advertisement could be. But you know, you have bills.

I get it.

You’re a hostage.

You don’t know how this happened.

Marketing seemed like such a fun, innocent job when you were in college. There’s good money in it! And you get to be creative! You get to actually use the artistic skills you spent years honing.

But before Coronavirus, it was definitely a lot more fun. You didn’t think you were really doing anything bad to people. Now, you’re not so sure. Should you really be encouraging people to sink their savings into a new car, when they’re not sure how long they’ll have a paycheck? A vacation, when they might have high medical bills? A trip to a theme park, when they might…die?

How do you ethically ask someone to buy something right now, when you yourself are hoping your department doesn’t get cut, and you’re stashing away all your money and…considering…maybe…getting an OnlyFans account?

A classy one, though. You know. One where you work out. Fully clothed.

None of that butt stuff.

Blink if you need help.

Or, if you can’t blink, pick one of the following to put in your next ad, and I know you’re crying out from marketing purgatory:

Palm trees. A person saying “unicorn” or an actual unicorn somewhere in the ad. A racially ambiguous woman with a white-sounding name.

I will be watching.