If you hear voices beckoning you to take a luxury cruise—or you feel an indescribable urge to whisper "Polo" into your coffee cup—Celebrity Cruises might be calling to you.
Venables Bell & Partners' first ad for the brand peddles the ship trips with an unusual globe-spanning game of Marco Polo: Crew members yell the "Marco" call, while confused potential customers—miles away, living their busy city lives—deliver the response, "Polo," without fully seeming to understand why.
It's not a terrible way to suggest adventure awaits, even if the actual product is a floating hotel. But the ad could just as easily be selling anti-psychosis medication—although if you start hallucinating, we don't suggest committing to a lengthy stay confined at sea with a couple thousand booze-guzzling humans. See a doctor instead.
It's not a terrible way to suggest adventure awaits, even if the actual product is a floating hotel. But the ad could just as easily be selling anti-psychosis medication—although if you start hallucinating, we don't suggest committing to a lengthy stay confined at sea with a couple thousand booze-guzzling humans. See a doctor instead.
Celebrity is billing its services as modern luxury, promising savings of up to $2,150—which makes a viewer wonder how much the trip could possibly cost to begin with. (A quick search shows a seven-night cruise to Bermuda, leaving from Cape Liberty, N.J., starts at about $709. By comparison, a similar nine-night cruise to Bermuda leaving from Baltimore on Royal Caribbean—which owns Celebrity—starts from about $846.)
Meanwhile, print ads—shown below—promise fine wine, chocolate and grass (the kind that grows in lawns, that is, in case you care for a game of bocce ball, or a picnic). The visuals make use of the X that echoes the one in Celebrity's logo.
Overall, it's way mellower than the pumped-up, colorful montages Mullen launched this past fall to lure millennials to Royal Caribbean. A more reserved, soothing approach may be appropriate, since Celebrity owns the dubious reputation of an outsized number of on-board stomach illnesses. But it also needn't worry—the threat of barfing your brains out is actually fairly low, statistically speaking, and was, according to estimates last year, not enough to stop the overall industry from growing in 2015.