Snakes On A Plane: The hilarious horrors of SkyMall Magazine

SkyMall magazine is where bad ideas go to die … and then crawl back to feed on the brains of innocent air travelers. A criminal line-up of infomercials, the magazine takes mankind’s worst ideas and puts them in your seat-back compartment. In a pressure-sealed cabin. At 30,000 feet.

At home you can change the channel – but up here there’s nowhere else to run.

Seen by 88 percent of all domestic fliers in the United States (650 million people a year), SkyMall is a never-ending cavalcade of insane, hilarious garbage. Hideous watches, purses, hats and jewelry, cat jackets, dog booties, life-size Sasquatch statues, jeans that lift your butt, helmets that use lasers to regrow your hair, authentic Harry Potter wands, litter boxes that look like entertainment centers, armadillo beer-holders, pick-pocket proof pants, and on and on and on.

The half-assed branding seen in SkyMall may not be as dense as the branding back on Earth, but it’s just as prevalent. Everywhere we go we are inundated with uninspired marketing campaigns that have nothing to do with how real humans think or feel. It’s just vapid crap that appeals only to our crippling boredom. They’re transparent get-rich-quick schemes without brains, bite or insight.

Obviously not everyone is looking to build something that will change the world. And there’s a time and place for useless shit. (If I ever need a pierogi Christmas ornament in the middle of June, SkyMall is my bro.) But anyone who wants to create something significant should have an innate sense that good products and brands serve a higher purpose. They should strive to make some aspect of life just a little bit better.

For them, SkyMall is not just a catalog of bad products. It’s a warning. It’s a graveyard of ineptitude – the Darwin Awards of branding – that should serve as a caricature of what can happen when you would rather make a buck than make an effort.

Bad brands are fun to laugh at, but good ones are just as fascinating. Check out what it takes to make one.