Friday Frivolity: Columbia Sportswear Posts Unilateral Offer to “Flat Earthers”
As reported on Creative Salon, among other places, Columbia Sportswear’s CEO has launched “Expedition Impossible,” offering its target audience, identified as “Flat Earthers” everything owned by “the company” if they can prove that the Earth is flat. Is it a unilateral offer, or just an ad campaign? Well, one hint is that the ad copy, reproduced in every story I found about “Expedition Impossible” describes it as a “tongue-in-cheek challenge.”
Is that enough to stop the Leonards of the world from dreaming of the sportswear equivalent of a harrier jet?
Here’s the ad:
The video does not say that it is a joke, but there are a few hints that it is, at best, tongue in cheek. But Columbia Sportswear is not taking any chances. The fine print at the end of the ad provides as follows:
The Company refers to “The Company LLC” with assets valued at $100,000. The “Edge of the Earth” is a visible, physical end to the planet Earth. We’re talking infinite sheer drop, abysmal void, clouds cascading into infinity. What is not the Edge of the Earth: a clifftop in Seattle. A cul-de-sac in Kansas. Or your buddy Dave legally changing his name to “The Edge.”
It’s clever. I’m amused. We’ll see if it’s too clever by half. After all, it was real work for me to decipher that fine print disclaimer. It’s a bit hard to believe that all of the stuff referenced in the ad actually belongs to The Company LLC, so the clear ad coupled with the fine-print disclaimer seems intentionally misleading to me, and the court in Izadi v. Machado (Gus Ford, Inc. might agree. Moreover, we have a list here. It does not say that it is exclusive. I hear the call of a canon of construction. A photo from El Capitan when the valley is shrouded in mist might be a winner.
Speaking of El Capitan, Untamed is, in my view, the best new series on Netflix right now, unless you count the long-awaited final season of Stranger Things as a new series. But skip the last episode. Tried to tie everything up in a bow and ended up jumping the shark instead.