If you walk in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, in that hyper-competitive quadrilateral between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue, you know that the look is constantly attacked. High three-dimensional screens such as palaces, multimedia installations and monumental windows scream for one, desperate reason: catching a crumb of your attention. In this jungle where multinationals burn millionaire budgets to be noticed, the award for the best marketing strategy of the year goes instead to a brilliant, dazzling and incredibly economical operation.
The merit is a pastel pink car, permanently parked in the center, which became the most photographed subject by passersby. On the side, written with spray cans in a style that perfectly imitates metropolitan graffiti, camping a message that is a masterpiece of irony: “Need money for Botox” (I need money for the Botox).
The visual impact is disruptive. In one of the most guarded and “clean” areas of New York, seeing a car apparently vandalized by bombolettes immediately captures the eye of the cynical New York City and the curious tourist. There is an aesthetic short circuit: the contrast between the formal elegance of Midtown buildings and the “street” nature of the medium is total.
Everyone stops. Many laugh, almost everyone pulls out the smartphone to take a photo to post on Instagram or TikTok. But approaching, it turns out the trick. This is not the desperate gesture of a citizen obsessed with aesthetic surgery, or the night raid of a writer in Brooklyn. That rose is not any paint, and the writing is not a spontaneous graffito: it is a very dry advertising campaign disguised as urban dissent.
The passerman who observes the dynamics and trends of marketing in New York, can only make the most sincere compliments to the company (a clinic of local aesthetic medicine) that gave birth to this idea. While competitors pay extra lease contracts for a billboard in Times Square or for a showcase on the Quinta Avenue – investments that often passersby ignore, now addicted to visual noise –, this car has achieved the ultimate goal with a ridiculous investment: the cost of a used car, a pink film and some paint strips.
Because of world griffes investing millions of dollars to appear there are. The most iconic case is of course in Midtown Manhattan, where luxury is an architecture of mirrors and ambition, and right here Gucci rewrites the urban landscape by transforming its Fifth Avenue yard into a monumental couture sculpture. No anonymous roof to hide the renovation works of the flagship store, but a scenic metamorphosis: the entire building covered and sculpted as an author gigantism, an imposing bag-baule that sits with ease on the most coveted side of the planet.
The façade thus becomes a three-dimensional canvas on which the iconic GG Supreme canvas is created, precisely crossed by the green and red web tape. The details travail the simple preparation to make high leather goods on an architectural scale: brown brass buckles, leather finishes that challenge gravity and sculptural handles that rise towards the sky of New York, almost to want to grasp the vertigo of the surrounding skyscrapers.
It’s not only a high rate viral marketing guerrilla operation, but a glossy identity statement. Projecting the archive of the maison in the financial and patinate heart of Manhattan means celebrating the Florentine origins of the brand – born in 1921 just as a casework of excellence – and at the same time dominating the contemporary scene. In the theatre of Quinta Avenue, where fashion is first and foremost a language of visual impact and power, Gucci shows that even a construction site transit can become the most desirable and photographed object of desire.
Genius lies in understanding the psychology of the road. Big marketing today must not sell a product, must sell a shareable content. That car, that of the botox, does not shout “come to us to make the punctuations”, but gives a joke, a smile, a piece of human comedy typically New York. It becomes a physical meme. And it is the audience itself, sharing the photo on social media, making it a free resonance box to the brand.
Then there is an exquisitely New York subtext that makes the operation of the pink car even more hilarious: the possession of space. Finding a parking space in Manhattan, between 5th and 7th Avenue, is an almost theological enterprise, as well as a scary luxury in terms of hourly rates or fines. Leaving a car there, in a beautiful exhibition, day after day, moving it only to respect the strict cleaning turns of the roads (alternate-side parking), is in itself a demonstration of power and presence on the territory.
While the coexists of fashion and finance study complex algorithms to penetrate our cognitive defenses, sometimes the solution is simpler: a pink car, a pop provocation and the courage to be cheated. Good, really. You beat the giants by playing with their own rules, but with a smile on your lips.
L’articolo «Need money for Botox» proviene da IlNewyorkese.
