Blathr Wayne Lorentz

The Carnival Breeze appears to be taking a poo in Galveston Channel.

You know how mid-tier cities desperate for attention create little signs or murals or plazas just so that people will take photographs of themselves and post them to social media and give the city free publicity? Carnival wins this game.

At Carnivalʼs cruise port in Cozumel, Mexico there is a small white sand beach. It is conveniently located right at the end of the pier that the tourists use to get off the ships.

It has a perfect little row of perfect little palm trees and perfect sand in front of perfect blue water, and the perfectly massive profiles of Carnivalʼs cruise ships in the background.

Thousands of people take pictures there each year and post them online without realizing that itʼs a marketing campaign. The stealth equivalent of those giant photo frame props that second-rate cities place around town to let the vanity-afflicted know exactly where to stand in order to get the perfect picture of themselves for social media.

Carnival deserves a big fat “good on you” for doing a great job with this guerrilla marketing technique, and pulling it off at industrial scale. It couldnʼt have been cheap to execute, and certainly demonstrates extensive vision and cooperation between departments within the company.

You can tell the Carnival Dream is a happy ship by the way itʼs always smiling.

I think the daily towel-in-the-shape-of-an-animal is a cute gimmick. But Iʼm not sure that “sea monster” is the best choice on a cruise ship.

You want to be mad because Carnivalʼs web site is needlessly complex. But who can be cross with a towel animal?