Lost in Seattle

Whilst driving from Madison to Seattle a couple years ago, I passed through South Dakota during a rain storm. Being the cautious driver that I am, I was interested in learning if the storm would get worse as I proceeded through the state or if it would let up.

Now, South Dakota has a special way of making “foreigners” feel at home. At the eastern border of the state, for example, drivers are greeted by a sign reading: “Animal Rights Activists Aren’t Welcome!” Even their radio stations are designed to obfuscate. The only one I could pick up that had driving conditions (as opposed to preaching) reported that it served “the entire Kelo-land region.”

WTF!? There was nothing on the map indicating a “Kelo” county or city. Even a hundred miles into the state, all the reports I could hear were for this mysterious “Kelo-land.” It was clearly some reference that only South Dakotans could get. Finally, I figured out that the station’s call letters were KELO and “KELO-Land” was their ridiculous “branded” term for the eastern part of the state. But that did absolutely nothing to help me figure out for what areas the road conditions applied to. Am I driving into a storm or out of it? The information was without context and, hence, completely useless for out-of-state motorists.

But South Dakota can’t be exclusively blamed for this type of myopia. Today, I was searching for some information and one high-ranking Google hit took me to an article on the Star-Telegram’s web site. The article seemed relevant to what I was looking for, but I was curious about where it was from.

There was nothing on the masthead that indicated the paper’s hometown. Nothing in the by-line. Nothing in a sidebar. Nothing in the footer. Only by inferring some local geographic information from the fourth paragraph of the article did I figure it out.

Here’s a challenge: Take a look at just this article (which was randomly selected and is not the one I was searching for) and tell me how long it takes you to figure out the hometown for the Star-Telegram.

Top officials draw top dollar

My take on this phenomenon is two-fold. Either the marketing folks believe that their brand is so well-known they don’t need to include the city of origin (which ignores the fact that people from outside the region lack that brand knowledge). Or, in an attempt to break free of regionalism and appeal to the broader worldwide audience that 21st-centry media enjoys, they avoid labelling their product with anything limiting it to a particular area. This, however, ignores the fact that most of their news only applies to that limited region, so the context of locale is even more crucial.

Either way it’s a bad marketing move.