BOB CICERO HAS A STORY he likes to tell about advertising. A few years ago, he was driving down the street when his son noticed a sign-holding man bobbing and weaving by the side of the road. The younger Cicero thought it looked ridiculous, and pointed it out to his father.
“He says, ‘Look over there on the corner–there’s a guy from Little Caesar, it’s kind of weird, he’s going back and forth,'” Cicero remembers. He asked his son, “What did it say?”
“It said $5 pizza.”
“That’s all he wanted,” Cicero told him. “It caught your eye. It doesn’t matter how outlandish it is, but it caught your eye. . . . Now if you’re hungry, you know there’s a $5 pizza. That’s all it did. Nothing else.”
That idea has been the focus at Globe Poster Printing, a nearly 80-year-old company that the Cicero family has run for the past 35 years. They have become specialists in grabbing your attention, just for the time it takes to read a poster. Once you’ve read it, their work is done.
