I’ve got three words that can help reshape city finance and remove some municipal annoyances as well: Bud Light cameras.
Thanks to Tribune investigations, everybody knows by now that Chicago’s 12-year-old red light camera traffic-ticketing program has been littered with inconsistencies and corruption, and it’s been a bad deal for taxpayers and ineffective as a safety system.
Thanks to fun little envelopes we get in the mail from time to time, everybody also knows that we pretty much hate red light cameras, dating back even to before we understood how badly the program was conceived and has been operated.
It’s not just the fines we have to pay for a minor and, often, not unsafe infraction such as going right on red without coming to a complete stop.
What’s even more bothersome is the Big Brother-ness of it all. The Robocop method of police work, performed not by trained peace officers but by functionaries reviewing footage, leaves us feeling a little more naked and unguarded in the world. It’s creepy.
My solution involves only a slight change to the common name of the program but a huge alteration in the approach.
We get America’s best-selling beer brand to sponsor the cameras. Instead of sneaky little peeping-Tom lenses strung up at select intersections, the city of the future features boldly labeled, flagrantly obvious “Bud Light cameras.”
But they’re not there to spy on us. That would go against Bud Light’s branding, which promotes the less flavorful version of Budweiser as the accompaniment-to-good-times, lower-calorie division. For example, Bud Light’s recent epic Super Bowl ad featured three apparent actual dudes plucked from a bar and led to a dance club that also contained a human-scale Pac-Man simulation.
One guy got to be Pac-Man, and much “whoo!”-ing and “yeah!”-ing ensued; this is apparently how humans react when they think they are just going to be out drinking Bud Light and then something interesting happens. How long did the ad-makers have to wait to find three bearded young guys willing to drink Bud Lights? Days, I’m guessing. Which might explain the vibe in the dance club/Pac-Man venue — desperate and bleary, like the cabin of a jet to Europe in the last hours before landing.
But the point is that Bud Light likes to associate itself with fun or, short of that, “fun.” The city’s new Bud Light cameras would go all the way up to Fun!
They won’t photograph people’s vehicles, people’s license plates or people on the streets. Instead, they’ll be programmed to take pictures of clouds shaped like animals and dramatic Lake Michigan sunrises and powerful lightning storms. They’ll keep an eye out for urban coyotes and other 312 and 773 wildlife: Isn’t that squirrel adorable? And they’ll make fascinating time lapses of condos going up, complete with balconies on which the people who overpay for them can keep to their suddenly constricted budget by drinking Bud Light instead of better beer.
And we, as citizens of this joyfully chronicled metropolis, can call up the Bud Light camera images from a website and post them to Twitter and Instagram and make GIFs and Vines of them and stick them on Pinterest and even print and frame them in ironic, nostalgic ways. It’ll make us all feel good about the idea of Bud Light in a manner that the product, perhaps, has not.
How would this come about?
I had a few Bud Lights and thought about it, but nothing came to mind. Then I had a few more Bud Lights and finally started to feel a little bit unfettered and able to think more creatively.
Bud Light will have to pay a lot, a whole lot, to turn our streetlight infrastructure into a minibillboard network and contemporary branding opportunity: scores of millions per year, let’s say. Purists who resent the Sherman’s march of marketing in our culture will protest, one imagines. But, face it, we lost that battle long before ivy on Wrigley’s outfield wall was trimmed to make way for an Under Armour logo.
Bud Light will likely also have to buy out the company that has the current camera deal. No problem. The mega-brewer probably has many more people who know how to do such contractual work than have ever touched hops.
Or maybe the city will clear the path for Bud Light. It can just strike the deal null and void because of the inherent problems with the red light camera program; a well-written contract certainly would have included such a clause, right?
And then, instead of sneaky, judgmental Big Brother watching us, we’ll have friendly, fun-loving Big Brother looking out for cool stuff to share with us. And we’ll all wish that, before Chicago institutionalized nanny cams at intersections, it had thought, instead, of going with — Whoo! Yeah! — Bud Light cameras, your party-lovin’ eyes in the sky.
