Quick: where’s the Advertising Icon Museum and soon-to-be-permanent home of the “Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame?” I know this sounds like a
trick question, so you are excused if you tried to be counterintuitive and said somewhere like Los Angeles or Chicago. But no, you have to travel to Kansas City, that hotbed of creative
executions and media buying that lies somewhere south of International Falls and north of Wichita Falls, and is perhaps better known for steaks and football teams that never make the playoffs.
All this because Robert A. Bernstein, who claims to have created The Happy Meal in 1976 (one of the few enduring legacies of that bicentennial year), and local PR guy Howard Boasberg
decided it would be so. No matter that two years of Advertising Week in the city that actually has a Madison Avenue, have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that people outside the industry
couldn’t care less about advertising (except how to limit it, or better yet, get rid of it altogether).
“The mission of the museum is to educate and enhance the
public’s appreciation (such as it is) and understanding of advertising and product branding through the use of advertising icons and fictional characters and to explore how they reflect
social and cultural values (pause, breathe slowly…),” say the two intrepid men from Kansas in a press release that reflects not only their own creativity but hopeless naiveté.
“Due to open in late 2007, the Advertising Icon Museum will showcase the world’s largest known collection of three-dimensional advertising icons. It
will feature public access to the permanent collection, permanent and temporary exhibitions, a two-story sculptural centerpiece (of Bernstein,
perhaps?), a wide range of educational programs for students from elementary school children (“who can spell subliminal?...”)
to marketing scholars, and (wait for it…) a gift shop.”
That all of this is part of a giant retail development that includes a boutique
hotel, a signature restaurant, a 261-seat auditorium, specialty service/retail shopping, a 1,000-space underground parking garage, and (wait for it…)
a rooftop swimming pool COULD give unbelievers pause to think the museum might be an “educational/cultural/public space” concession to assure the development gets past the local
zoning board. But one would think the absurd idea that Americans will travel to Kansas City (wherever it is) to visit an advertising museum would cause the arm of even a city council
graduate of KSU to shoot in the air, so he might utter: “Let me see if I have this straight…”
But, apparently not.
I think all those who
can’t seem to outgrow their fascination for the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man and Ronald McDonald should join a very secret club where they can get shitfaced, smoke cigars, dress up as
Tony the Tiger and The Michelin Man and dance around a campfire singing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing…” and classic rock songs repurposed for commercials thought to have
some appeal to aging baby boomers. They can play strip trivia games matching icons to slogans and watch old 8-mm reels of “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” projected on a bed sheet strung between
two pines in the California night air. A sort of Bohemian Grove for ad addicts.
Then maybe, just maybe, they will get over themselves and leave the rest of us the hell alone.