Great Moments in Advertising: Bronx Zoo Sells New Yorkers a Slice of Home

This is some trick they're playing up in the Bronx. As best we can tell, the Bronx Zoo is trying to get people to come there by telling them that there will be cockroaches there -- over 100,000 of them, as part of a new exhibit showcasing the creatures and environs of the island of Madagascar. We’ve seen this roach infested ad campaign on this website, and as a banner ad on the New York Post website - the bugs crawl across the ad as the page is loading.

“Hey New Yorkers, are you bored with the same old cockroaches? Maybe you didn’t know just how creepy a cockroach could be. Well come on up to the zoo because we’ve got hissing cockroaches here. Yeah, that’s right. ‘Hssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!’ One at a time people. Plenty of room for everyone . . . plenty of room.”

Leaping f*cking lemurs. It gets better. According to The Architect’s Newspaper, there’s “an ‘immersion’ feature where visitors can step inside the pitch black, hollowed-out trunk of a simulated baobab tree. As your eyes adjust you notice that things are starting to move…because you’re sharing the trunk with over 100,000 cockroaches! They’re actually Hissing Cockroaches, indigenous to Madagascar and—so they say—completely harmless.”

Completely harmless? Until one of them decides to burrow into your ear, or somewhere else (!?). And then what, smarty?

What we’re having the hardest time understanding here is the way the roaches are prominently featured in the ad campaign, like, “yeah, lemurs are cute, and we did spend millions renovating this beautiful building to create a stunning exotic island environment, but once they see these roaches they’ll really come in droves.” We suppose there might be a “confront your fears/have a transcendental experience” angle to sell with respect to the roach tunnel, but it doesn’t look like they’re selling that. We can’t find a mention of the feature anywhere on the Zoo’s website.

Even with no roaches crawling near our holes we’re still scratching our heads because we’re sure that the Zoo paid lots and lots of money for these ads. We hope that someone at New York's esteemed Comptroller's Office might take a closer look at City procurement of advertising agencies. We’re not sure how the success of ad campaigns is measured, but if this one is somehow proven to work, maybe John Doe really does have the upper hand.

“What’s in the box?”