A friend sent me a link to Time Magazine’s Person of the Year article. I already knew who the Person of the Year was, but I decided to click the link. Before I was able to view the article, I had to view an advertisement for the Chrysler Sebring.
Ordinarily, this would have been dull, but this particular advertisement caught my eye. In fact, I was compelled to click “replay” — twice! — but not because of any clever wit or creativity in the advertisement. No, I viewed it three times because of the message it contained:
“You might not be Time Person of the Year. But you can drive like you are.”
After viewing that advertisement, I arrived at the article, which, of course, names as its person of the year:
“You.”
That is hysterically bad advertising.
I would have been enticed back when it was Man of the Year, but Person of the Year just doesn’t have that same ring to it, so I’ll stick with my minivan.
I actually went to the link – and it says Walter Chrysler was Person of the Year in 1928. So maybe I was wrong – there really was never a Man of the Year, and it has always been Person of the Year. Or maybe this is 1984, and all the references to Man of the Year have been sucked away to the incinerator.
It’s great advertising. How many of us would have seen the ad or even remembered what it was for?
Well, the Ever-Changing Object of the Year hasn’t even involved people every year. I’m sure there are many such examples, but there are two amusing choices from the 80s:
1982: the computer was named “Machine of the Year”
1988: the endangered earth was named “Planet of the Year”
How do you deliver a Planet of the Year award? Fling it in an ocean current and hope it gets circulated around? Carve it on the moon so the Earth can see it from, well, Earth?