Bohemian Cinema By Jonathan Pacheco

I’ve Been to the Edge and Back

Tags: Blacksburg

Back in late February and early March, the company I currently freelance for hired an ad agency to propose a campaign to rebrand the school; they’ve had a recording school, but just started a Digital Film School, so they need attention brought to it.

The company proposed a campaign with several taglines, the most prominent one being:

“Imagine a school where shooting is actually encouraged.”

They approached radio stations with the campaign, asking them to create ads for them based on a script from the school and/or the agency. A station did, but did it with little effort and poor results, so someone from the school created another one, based on the same script. It began:

                                        VOICEOVER
                    Imagine, a school where shooting is actually 
                    encouraged....

GUNSHOTS.  SCREAMS.

Then, the sound of a record being stopped abruptly.

                                        VOICEOVER
                    Not THAT kind of shooting!

Controversy followed the ads wherever they went, but the agency reassured the school that the attention was good, and it gave them an “edgy” look. I didn’t agree with the ad or the method, but later on there were shirts made with a similar but different tagline:

“Learn to shoot people for a living.”

For some reason, I was okay with this, and actually wore the shirt in early March. “School” and “shooting” were not mentioned in the same sentence and are not even implied in this second one, so what’s left is a curious and provocative line that begs inquiries. I thought it was much better. But alas, all the brochures and ads had the first tagline.

Fast forward to this past weekend. Fast forward to Blacksburg. Now turn on the radio and try to listen to these ads. No, you won’t find them there anymore, as I’m sure they’ve been wisely pulled. Of course, we now have everyone claiming to have been against the campaign in the first place, or at least felt “uneasy” about it.

I wonder how “edgy” those ads would feel now….