• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, January 17, 2006

Warning: Satire Ahead

Los Angeles-based MediaBuys, which the city of New Orleans hired to secure corporate sponsorship for next month’s first post-Katrina Mardi Gras, has announced that all sponsorships sold out within 24 hours.

Oddly, all of the sponsorships were taken, not by traditional advertisers as had been expected, but by numerous governmental agencies including FEMA, The White House Office for Spin Control, The Department of Homeland Security and The Army Corps of Engineers.

FEMA said that it would divert $5 million from its “speedy and highly praised relief efforts” to build floats depicting heroic scenes from the Katrina disaster, including a hip hop dance contest outside the bathrooms of the Louisiana Super Dome, and will underwrite a caravan of buses that will traverse the parade route, but not pick up anybody.

“We are a little behind schedule building our floats,” says a FEMA spokesperson, “But please reassure Mardi Gras that we are on our way. ASAP. Soon.  Really, I mean it, any day now. Really, really, shortly. We promise.”

The White House Office for Spin Control issued a statement praising President Bush’s economic programs, the war effort and Samuel Alito. “We are all about happiness,” said the statement. “If we can make it seem like Katrina didn’t happen and that the Federal government didn’t screw up the response and remind everyone that President Bush hugged a bunch of people who had just lost everything they had in life, then our money will be well spent at Mardi Gras.  First round is on the White House! Party on, you wild and crazy flood victims!”

The Department of Homeland Security will underwrite the cost of additional security so that “terrorist elements who want to disrupt our precious way of life don’t plant a car bomb and blow debris even farther inland.” A spokesperson declined to elaborate on Mardi Gras plans, citing national security, although he confirmed that there would be no phone taps on private citizens during the celebration, “essentially because nobody has a working phone yet.”

A PR specialist 4^th class for The Army Corps of Engineers told MediaPost, “This will be tricky.  Every year we go to Congress and whine about how we don’t have enough money to spend on all the shit we have to build, or dredge or repair, but that we think it’s a good idea to spend a bunch of cash on a giant party where drunken college girls show their boobs in exchange for 3 cents worth of plastic beads. Well, they’d probably see the merit in that part of it, but I’m not sure if they’ll then give up the $50 billion or so we need to protect the city the next time a Big One hits the Gulf.  It’d probably be cheaper if we just raised the city about 20 feet above sea level and called it a day.”  The Corps will decorate earth-moving equipment with pirates and mermaids and toss contaminated-water-filled snow globes of the New Orleans skyline to the crowds.

“This is a great day for the advertising community,” wrote Bob Liodice in his hardly read blog on the ANA website. “It is unlikely that New Orleans could have pulled off this annual drunken bacchanalia without the support of the ad community.  Are there more pressing needs like new homes, new schools, new roads, and new jobs?  Sure there are.  But if advertising can help people forget for just a few weeks that their lives are in ruins around them, I say hooray for free enterprise.”