Growing up every summer my family stuffed our Chevy station wagon with provisions for a two-week trip to a remote Northern Michigan destination we called Uncle Pete’s farm outside a small berg called Hoxeyville. His aging two-story farmhouse was dressed in a tattered white coat of paint and sat on a knoll surrounded by those long-needled white pines that whispered in the wind.
Although this 19th-century homestead could boast the use of electricity which had been installed in the 1940s, the improvements ended there. Running water came from a well that required constant pumping from a squeaky iron hand pump in the backyard. Next to the lazy-looking garage, cords of firewood sat patiently waiting to fuel the massive octogenarian black kitchen wood stove that heated water for cooking, cleaning, and bathing. A lonely two-seater pit Toilet was located far enough away from the back door that we soon discovered as darkness fell, chamber pots were a safe alternative rather than risking being eaten by Timberwolves lurking down by the outhouse. A wall phone was available albeit a mile away at the corner grocery store. At breakfast instead of gazing at iPads, we read the back of cereal boxes on a dented kitchen table sporting ancient cigarette burns from long-forgotten poker games.
Being raised in a neighborhood by parents that mirrored something out of the 50’s sitcom Leave it to Beaver, our family was smitten enough by this simplicity to be drawn back to this farmhouse for a decade of summers. That is the power of nostalgia. Often thought of as a sickness before it was studied and understood, nostalgia is a powerful tool that advertisers and politicians have long used.
That too is to our advantage in OOH. Nostalgia is in our favor. The simplicity of my Uncle’s farm life is much like our industry. We post creative images in the public space, viewed and digested, and internalized over and over as citizens carrying on their daily lives and routines, simple and poetic in their existence. Yes, we have gotten a bit more uptown with digital and programmatic, but it’s still pretty basic and simple. And as we know, simple works!
Helping simplify your efforts to obtain POP and glam photography for your clients is what FotoFetch is all about. Tell us the photo you need and leave the rest to us. It is as simple as my Aunt Gerda making blueberry pancakes on that old wood stove. We just watched while the magic happened.
by Steve Lind, Chief Evangelist, FotoFetch
steve@fotofetch.com
Phone 425-749-4434 ext. 104
206-409-2647 Cell
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