Random Recordings of Mental Meanderings

I’ve been seeing a lot of billboards around town for Fight Mannequinism!. I thought from the name that it was some sort of anti-anorexic-looking-model-type screed. The billboards don’t tell you anything, except the Internet address, in big strange edgy font and colors. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It’s a campaign by the Ad Council directed at young folk meant to inspire volunteerism, voting, and paying attention to current events. It’s generally perceived that most kids don’t care about those things. That apparently comes from the fact that most don’t vote, and few volunteer, and most would rather watch Comedy Central or sports than see what’s going on in the world. I remember when I was 18-24 years old, though. Most of my friends and I were involved in things like that, except the voting thing. We were also into booze, drugs, getting laid, and work or school or both. And it isn’t always easy accomplishing all that.

While the website’s an admirable idea, I don’t think that it’s a well-done site. It’s too campy, to reaching. I don’t think it will do well, especially since it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a couple of weeks, at least. The last person to be put on the site was a girl from Brooklyn on some undetermined date, probably in early December. The blog hasn’t been updated since before Christmas. Whoever is running the site needs to update it more often. Maybe put a messageboard on it or something.

It’s funny. the site and campaign has been around since March 2005, and I just started seeing the billboards last week. Great timing, getting adverts up a year too late.

I downloaded a couple of videos, they weren’t that good. The more memorable one was a 30-second clip of “breaking news”, sirens blaring, with incoherent, choppy male voices in the background. The cameraman gets out of the car, runs onto a lawn to zoom in on a couple of mannequins sunning themselves on a lawn. The last 5-10 seconds were a shot of the fightmannequinism logo apparently on a copier. It wasn’t very good.

The whole site screams, “Hey, we’re a bunch of aging boomers trying to get kids to do something productive.” Either that, or it’s done by an overweight hippie chick who could probably use some sun and some exercise. The only name I could find connected to the site (other than Devon, the mysterious blogger) was a Jenny Lee. She’s a ad exec with Golin Harris, and is located in Arlington, Virginia. Apparently, she was also in charge of a “Happy Birthday, Smokey Bear” campaign.

If she is the one who is doing the site, she needs to do more for it, or it will fail. Make it more interactive. Add a chatroom, or as I said earlier, a bbs system. They are both easy to do, and will make it more popular. Plus, instead of having a dozen or so people spotlighted, they could actually have people interacting. Which would probably get more people involved.