Guerilla Marketing

There is a restaurant on Westwood Boulevard called Matteo's "A little taste of Hoboken." What?

I only thought a little about this, driving past, because my focus was quickly shifted to the girl and boy dressed as Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam, respectively, trying to draw passersby's attention to the tax preparer's office they were standing in front of. They both looked miserable. It was a warm day. But I was also stumped by the illogic of the scale of them. They were approximately the same height. And I don't know in what universe that would ever be true. Wasn't Uncle Sam designed to be un ordinary-sized guy who just happens to have a very menacing finger to point? Whereas Lady Liberty is this huge statue and you can climb inside her head, and she won't feel it or nothing. I would have stopped to take a picture, but I had places to be. And they really did look embarrassed and unhappy, and I felt sorry for them. I hope they weren't doing it for free. Like if the tax preparer's office is owned by their parents or something. How much would that suck.

I'm not really a fan of this method of advertising. Getting a guy to dress up as a sandwich to dance around and wave me in to the Subway. I can't think of anything I have ever not wanted that -- when faced with a gigantic anthropomorphized human-filled version of it -- I suddenly found myself irresistibly drawn to purchase. Not sandwiches. Not cell phones. Not diamonds. Not real estate. But then I did buy a vacuum-sealed bag of clams at Von's on Sunday night on an impulse. Never underestimate the value of a smartly-placed endcap.