We Paid HOW Much For That?

As most of you know, I recently stopped working for UCLA Extension, a curious organization which is actually older than UCLA itself. It was 90 years ago when the first Extension classes were offered in Los Angeles, or 360 academic quarters ago, depanding on your point of view. And for most of them, Extension has published a large catalog that lists all of the classes, seminars, certificate programs, and (more recently) distance learning (online) classes offered for that quarter. If you've lived in L.A. for any length of time, you've probably seen one of their catalogs in your mailbox, with its distinctive cover art, which will usually reference the concept of "extension" and/or the quarter to which it belongs. For example, the cover for Spring Quarter a few years ago was a close-up photograph of a quarter (a U.S. quarter-dollar coin) under a spring approximately the size of the coin's diameter. "Spring" and "Quarter" -- Spring Quarter. Get it?

Last winter's catalog was heralded by the advertising people who came up with it as being one of the best covers ever -- the best concept, the best artwork, and so on. Even as a complete newbie to the organization, I could feel the excitement as we waited to see what it actually looked like. Imagine our collective surprise when the cover turned out to be a tiny (1" by 2") classified ad about Extension, "taped" to a blue field with two strips of yellow tape -- UCLA Bruin colors, blue and gold. Needless to say, everyone was speechless...

That is, until one member of our team who is studying design piped up with the plaintive question "We paid HOW much for this?"

We've all hearn the jokes about organizations that can not paint the latrine without running five focus groups and a double-blind comparison survey, but this was the sort of thing only an adman could love. Or perhaps a senior marketing executive of some kind. adding insult to injury, as far as we working stiffs were concerned, was the fact that the "artist" who came up with this cover was paid $5,000 for his work, which as far as we could tell, any ordinary six-year-old could have duplicated in five minues...

If there were taxpayers involved, there would probably have been outcry. Fortunately, Extension is entire self-supporting, and receives no taxpayer money whatsoever, which kept us from having to explain to an outraged public why we were spending their money on the dubious project. In fairness, the inside front cover had one of the best bits of advertising I've ever seen: A letter from the Governor of California, telling how when he first came to America he took classes at Extension while pursuing his career as a bodybuilder. It's hard to argue with a guy who arrived in this country barely able to speak the language and went on to superstardom in Hollywood, enormous commercial success in business, and was then elected Governor of the richest and most populous state in the Union, and his endorsement is a simple message that anyone who isn't actually brain-dead should be able to understand about just what a great opportunity classes at Extension can be.

Which is the point, of course: the ad on the cover is supposed to be the sort of thing an obscure Austrian body-builder recently arrived in this country might have seen in the back of a newspaper, and responded to. Clearly, the ad on the cover is intended to make us imagine Arnold looking at it in the gym between sets, and getting an idea, and the inside cover is supposed to represent how far he has come as the result of reading that humble ad. And, I suppose, under some circumstances, this might actually work. But I had to have someone who knows much more about design than I ever will explain it to me, and some quite good designers of my aquaintence (who have since seen the thing) have all had the same reaction to it: "You paid HOW much for that?"