I love clever advertising

I love some of the advertising that is aimed at runners. In fact, I will frequently flip through iRun on the way home from the mailbox just to look at the ads (most of them have little enough text that I won’t run into anything or veer into traffic). Of course I am not talking about ads for boneheaded diet supplements, but rather about clever ones that make it clear that the company “gets it.”

There are plenty of them out there, but I’ll take the Saucony “We Know” campaign for example. You know the ones – mostly black page with a strip of 4 pictures towards the top, and the words “We know…because we run” in red, then the white part that replaces the “…” changes.

Inside the back cover of the March iRun: “We know 26.2 is the short part. Because we run.”

I liked “We know runs end. But being a runner never stops because we run,” in particular because the first picture in the strip is of a guy stretching his quad in an empty board room. This made me laugh as my mind ran away with it. I imagined what it would be like to work at Saucony:

– gels with caffeine at “marathon” meetings rather than coffee, and you don’t get a bagel until it’s over!
– the cafeteria has at least one pasta dish a day, and the vending machines sell sports drink and chocolate milk (as an aside, I have recently noticed chocolate milk ads on TV that are aimed at athletes – it’s about time they started to capitalize on that research!)
– the office would have a great on-site gym and showers, of course!
– running breaks would be mandatory
– performance reviews would be an easy 5K around the neighbourhood with the boss

But this is where I started to get nervous…what would the selection process be like? Would I be able to bring my race bib-and-medal collection, and that would be enough? Or would I actually have to run timed trials? I can see it now, getting the letter: “While your experience and accomplishments are impressive, we decided to go with a candidate with better PBs in every distance…” Ack! There goes my last hope of making a career out of running!

Well then I thought to myself, they must welcome people of all levels of ability. I am sure they are happy that people are making healthy lifestyle choices, and would encourage everyone to buy their shoes apply. They ARE runners, after all.