Get Tacky and Stick

One of my most cherished holiday traditions is to travel around and gawk at tacky lights.  There’s something about thousands of flickering lights haphazardly scattered over a quiet suburban yard combined with a cocktail of inflatable santas, plastic reindeer, sprinkled with years of eclectic christmas clutter that warms my heart. We stop at each one, applaud the amount of time it took to assemble the cheerful scene, debate the amount of the electric bill, and argue over which is our favorite based on merits of tacky and tasteless. It’s also contagious. Once one house vomits Christmas cheer on the lawn, the Joneses down the street catch the holiday bug and next thing you know there’s a whole street infected with dueling tacky.

As a marketer, I can’t help but think of the creative sponsorship possibility here. Hundreds of people pass by these houses each night. There’s a screaming opportunity for a glowing sign in the yard: Thank you to ABC Credit Union for making this possible by paying our electric bill. It would even make a fun contest where participants get their electric bill paid during the holidays.

Who gets the most traffic? It isn’t the house with the candles nestled safely in the windows or the grazing white reindeer. It’s the one that gets a cherry picker to put the Grinch at the top of the tree and find a way to spell Merry Christmas on their roof so airplanes flying overhead can enjoy the cheer. It’s the wackiest, the tasteless, and the ones that go to the edge that garner thousands of on-lookers over the holidays. Anything else seems ho hum after you’ve seen a home’s lights synchronized to music played on its own radio frequency.

As you move into 2011, how can you orchestrate something remarkable that {inspires people to talk}:

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