Victors & Spoils

This is one of a few ideas I submitted to Victors and Spoils as the deadline approaches for Harley, a brand in need of new devotees. (Click.)

The October Country

It's 1932! Get Your Depression On with a $195 Harley-Davidson. Leave your troubles behind, brother, as you scour the countryside looking for a meal or a job digging a ditch. Maybe head out West and help build that Hoover Dam. (Click for the massive)

Even in Florida you can feel October in the air. The overnight low last night was in the upper 60s and the pool is getting colder. Halloween crap lines the store shelves and I don't break a sweat just standing in the garage. It's on in a big way. When you say "Autumn," you don't mean September or November. And for the sake of beauty, poetry and this mongrel language we call English, let's call it Autumn instead of Fall.

Surveys* show that Americans prefer October four to one over every other month on the calendar. I think we love October for the nostalgia. When I was a kid I loved it for the nostalgia of years before I was born, books I'd read could put me there and the descriptions of smells in the air and the feelings they'd conjure were just as they were wherever I was. Now I love it for the nostalgia of my childhood, and even in Florida the damp smell of leaves or a brief cool breeze can put me in Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, Virginia, New York or any other place where I experienced a real, true October as it was meant to be. I think Virginia Octobers stand out the most in my mind, the autumn colors somehow a brighter memory. But down here we don't really get to feel what Midwesterners and Northeasterners are experiencing right now until about February, when we put on our thin coats and grumble about having to wear socks.

In the ad above, you can see where I started to colorize the leaves and then bailed out, not wanting to waste that much time on a throwaway for a blog post that will be ephemera by tomorrow. Got other fish to fry - or apples to cobble and pumpkins to gut. I've been spending some time over at Victors and Spoils, the crowdsourcing agency that gets a lot of crap from bloggers who bemoan its model as an attempted usurpation of traditional agencies. But right now those traditional agencies are at best, not hiring, and at worst, folding. I see Victors and Spoils as an opportunity for me to throw out some ideas on big brands I might never get to touch otherwise and who knows, maybe pitch an idea that wins me some cash. Right now they're accepting ideas for Harley-Davidson, a brand I  have  no  problem offering advice to while pointing out what they're doing wrong.

Well - that's enough for now. Time to go do a quick 5K and then jump in the pool.

* Surveys are known to lie.