I want Sarah Palin to be My Turkey Lurkey Girl

By / November 26, 2008 /

From Guest Editor, Jeremy Greenfield

What you didn’t see in the now-famous Sarah Palin/turkey slaughter video was the cameraman pissing his pants. He actually blew a hole in his jeans about one minute into the interview. Equally entertaining was the look on the reporter’s face. If you saw her, you might think it was what is classically known as an “O-face.” But us grizzled journalists know it as the “are you getting this?!” face. Question is, what does this mean for the advertising community?

I’m going to keep this short due to the holiday and whatnot (and add in some “so on,” “such as,” “indeed,” and “what have you,” for good measure). Everything you (your brand, your company, etc., etc.) do in the post-advertising age—which, by the way friends, we are squarely in—is marketing. I repeat: Everything you do is marketing. When GM flies its CEO in a private jet to D.C. to beg for money while at the same time making crappy cars, that’s marketing that says, We are wasteful and desperate and we love selling you crappy cars! Marketing!

Everything that Palin does gets added, in our minds, to our image of the Palin brand. And what is that brand? It’s the most gaff-happy brand ever. Palin, it seems, wants to be filmed after pardoning a turkey (an executive tradition) in front of an operating turkey-killing machine. Awesome.

But, aside from missing the amazing spectacle of a cameraman peeing his pants while a reporter cums in hers, you also missed what was really going on there. Imagine: Barack Obama starts talking about how Americans have to prepare for the worst after coming out of a senate hearing about the financial bailout in front of Tiffany’s while his wife shops inside. Would the reporters be falling all over themselves to catch him doing it? No fucking way. They’d be like, “Uh, Mr. God, sir, do you think you could stand over here in front of these poor children and hand them this twenty dollar bill? No, no, I don’t need it. It’s just my food money for the day.” Reporters can’t wait to catch Palin putting her foot into that sexy, sexy beauty-queen mouth of hers. And it’s not fair. It’s just not fair!

When you have a friend who is very clumsy, do you purposefully try to trip him up every time you see him, and then while he is on the ground you kick him in the jaw and then you laugh so hard that it feels like someone is ripping into your sides with a moose-killing-sized bowie knife? You do? Me too. So, watch your brand out there. Because the media is watching you.

Jeremy Greenfield is editor of Post Advertising and a contributor to AdFreak, Adweek’s blog.