Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

To be fair, the banking behemoth didn't drop 30 large just to eliminate that pesky three-letter article from its slogan. No, actually it invested most of it in cooking up the motto "Let's Get It Done." But in seeking to exploit that common man, can-do approach, the army (and I'm sure it was an army) of semi-conscious dunderheads marketing gurus behind that message was apparently unaware of comedian Larry the Cable Guy, star of such cinematic classics as Delta Farce and Witless Protection, whose catchphrase happens to be "Git-R-Done."

Thirty million dollars. That's a three, followed by seven zeroes.

Well, whatever. Lop of the "The" and throw "Citi Never Sleeps" back out there.

Meanwhile, there are other oddball marketing strategies flying around at the moment. (Is it the heat? No, it's only May 20. Maybe it's the strain of the Presidential campaign. Or high gas prices. Or Syesha getting the boot from Idol.) The Four Seasons New York (and, apparently, several other hotels nationwide) is offering an "It's-Not-All-About Sex and the City" package to, um, give menfolk something to do while their female friends are ostensibly off enjoying the big-screen adventures of Carrie "Not Terry" Bradshaw and her gal-pals come May 30.

The package includes one round of "anything but Cosmos" in the hotel bar, a steak dinner, a complimentary DVD library featuring Rambo, Die Hard, and Full Metal Jacket, and "double-bedded accommodations" -- just in case potential he-men customers fear getting a little tooclose to their compadres. The bill for this musky, testosterone-fueled adventure? $2,000 per night.

Wouldn't sitting through the film be easier? Well, on second thought...

Lastly, there's Stride Gum's announcement that, should the petition at website StopUweBoll.Org collect one million signatures by May 14, each signer would receive a digital coupon for a pack of gum, downloadable on May 23 -- the same day that Boll's latest videogame-based film, Postal, opens.

(Boll, for the uninitiated, is generally held to be the world's worst living film director, having already "delighted" audiences with the likes of BloodRayne, House of the Dead, and Alone in the Dark, featuring the inimitable Tara Reid as a "genius anthropologist." There was a time when he was actually fighting any movie critic willing to get into the ring with him. Postal, incidentally, posits a love affair between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, and stars Dave Foley, Zack Ward, and Verne Troyer -- "Mini Me" from the Austin Powers films. See how it all ties together?)

The bad news: the petition had collected only some 278,000 signatures by this morning. Another defeat for the chicle-chewing/celluloidic car-crash fan in all of us.

What other Tales of the Weird do marketers have lurking out there this summer? And could any of them possibly cost thirty million dollars?

We'll be watching ...