Branding an Abduction Information Service

As I was watching a baseball game on Sunday, something crawled across the bottom of the screen that made me take notice immediately: Amber Alert! Ever since the Amber Alert was just a local Dallas warning system, I've grown accustomed to paying attention to the forthcoming information on an abducted child. Only this time there was no information. The scroll at the bottom of the screen was simply reporting the results of the AMBER Alert Portal Indy 300 at Kentucky Speedway.

This has to be a new step for a public service like the Amber Alert, and I'm not sure what to make of these types of organizations sponsoring things like sporting events. My initial reaction when I saw it was concern for the dilution of a phrase that is used only in very specific emergency situations. Like it or not, if every football game you watched featured the Flash Flood Warning Starting Lineups, the warning might lose some of its immediacy in an actual emergency.

On the other hand, the event was meant to coincide with Kentucky's rolling out an upgraded Amber Alert system, and as a public service it probably deserves more attention than whatever would have otherwise preceded the name of the event. But if they wish to pursue a course like this, those who "market" the Amber Alert should be careful. Services that subsist on the public's trust are quite different from soft drinks and SUVs: where consumer goods are concerned with gaining brand equity, a program like Amber Alert, which has already achieved collaboration between law enforcement, the media, and the public, might be more concerned with losing brand equity.

p.s. The Amber Alert was begun in the Dallas area, inspired by Amber Hagerman. When it was expanded nationally, some other cities protested that the inspirations for their local alert systems would be forgotten. So the government stepped in with an ingenious solution. I didn't realize this until just now, but the AMBER Alert is no longer named after Amber Hagerman. AMBER is an acronym standing for America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.