Matt’s caption read, “The relationship was less symbiotic than I’d hoped.” He ended up second in the public vote.
His entry catered to an image of two fish swimming in the sea-one as a set of bones and one in more full-bodied form. In the fall of 2014, one of our judges, Matt Sterenberg, was picked as a finalist for the real New Yorker caption contest.
#NEW YORKER CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST HOW TO#
We need good ideas in business, and an important part of producing them is learning how to expose flaws in our thinking. And I would argue the same clarity of thinking is required outside marketing too, for the entrepreneur or corporate executive designing a new strategy, for example. This work of moving from general idea to powerful copy at some point requires the discipline of pen hitting the page, then revising what’s there-again, and again, and again. Making general statements like “I think we can connect to Millennials with authentic branding” is a whole lot easier than writing a pitch that achieves the goal. For marketers, it is easy to rest in abstractions. One thing I have learned through the discipline of writing is how rarely I can assess the quality of my ideas (or lack thereof) until I write them down. But that’s not right: good writing comes from good sentences.” He suggests that “inexperienced writers sometimes imagine that good writing comes from good ideas. As a creative writing professor, Cody’s goal is to fix the broken assumptions of the inexperienced writer. Walker started his own contest a number of years ago with a group of his students at the University of Washington. The idea first came to me when I read a post on the New Yorker blog by Cody Walker, a University of Michigan creative writing professor and New Yorker caption contest winner. You and Your Teamĭon’t let poorly-crafted communications hold you back. When done well, the exercise drives a lively class discussion on language and meaning, and generates a wealth of implications for future marketing professionals. I then take those four back to the class to have the students choose their favorite. When all the entries are in, I send them to a team of friends who work in comedy full- or part-time, asking them to pick the top four. But I’d like to think unfamiliarity is par for the course, as even fewer of them expect a weekly humor competition to be a graded portion of their capstone marketing class.Įach Monday of the semester, I send that week’s New Yorker caption contest to my students, who have until Friday at 5 PM to come up with their own submission. Many have not even heard of the magazine, let alone its famous caption contest. While a good number of my students chuckle to themselves, few if any are regular readers of the New Yorker.
The caption states, “Nobody ever asks ‘ How’s Waldo?’” It’s sharp. It is an image of a familiar red-and-white-shirted man with matching cap and wooden cane. On the first day of my undergraduate marketing strategy course, I show my students one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons.
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