Last updated on 2022-01-04
In our ongoing critique of South Dakota’s economic development ads, let’s look at the Aberdeen Development Corporation’s new pitch, courtesy of local admeisters Production Monkeys:
“Discover Aberdeen”—whew! For a moment, I was afraid they were going to say, “Discover the Unexpected!”
The video presents pretty much what you’d expect in Aberdeen: hunting, ice-fishing, snowmobiling, bicycling, dining, shopping, guns, a parade, basketball, the carnival rides, and Storybook Park. Alas, Production Monkeys left out the world headquarters of Dakota Free Press. But hey: folks don’t need to come to Aberdeen to enjoy the best blog in South Dakota, so I’ll let the omission slide… this time.
The video runs 55 seconds—tighter than the Brookings video featuring Mayor Tim Reid… although that Brookings video was shot to invite the President to visit, not to fit into a TV ad slot. The Aberdeen ad appeals to every group’s attention: men and women, old and young, outdoorsy and indoorsy, shoppy and shooty… as long as those groups are white. I’ve seen people of color around town—remember, foreign immigrants make up 85% of the workforce at Aberdeen’s Molded Fiber Glass—but I didn’t see one in this video, not even in the crowd shot at the basketball game. Like the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, this video ignores the large audience of folks who don’t look like us on whom our economic future seems to depend.
But the video shows the Brown County Fair and David Novstrup’s go-carts. Best of all, it feels no need to mention Mars.
Will this video bring a stampede of tourists and workers to Aberdeen? Commentariat, the floor is open for your artistic and economic critique.
Too bad it failed to acknowledge recent immigrants – like the very folk who settled Aberdeen, like half of my kin. The new immigrants have a different origin; big dill. How soon we forget, thinking that a generation or few is somehow a new normal. If the Great Plains settlement experiment survives beyond reservations, Hutterites, and a Buffalo Commons – it will only so do on the backs of new immigrants.
Good music and video. The pace of the imaging wasn’t too fast, as I’ve seen in some videos. Sometimes videos flash past so quickly identification of specific images isn’t possible. I liked it.
Is Production Monkeys an Aberdeen business?
It was awfully pasty in skin hues, but that looks normal to me because I lived in Aberdeen in the 70s and there weren’t even blacks on NSC’s boys sports teams.