After being roundly criticized here at Behind the Buzz and elsewhere for their new commercial, General Motors and the ad agency which created the spot, McCannErickson, have responded to the criticisms.
Their basic response has been to assert less is more, lack of credibility promotes trust and that the commercial is so boring it’s compelling.
Call it the Cartoon Strategy. There hasn’t been this much attempt to create a positive spin since Looney Tunes introduced the Tazmanian Devil character back in the 60s.
McCann Erickson maintains the ad “tested well” with consumers. Unfortunately, “testing well” doesn’t appear to be translating into car …read more

Take a walk with me. We’ll stroll along with Ed Whitacre, the chairman of General Motors, as he walks through the latest GM commercial which is filmed either at GM’s corporate offices or on an old set from Grey’s Anatomy.
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Sleep aid
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From the outset of the commercial, the mood is best described as antiseptic. It’s like you’re walking through a hospital with an OSHA inspector.
Between Ed’s black suit and the lack of inflection in his voice, everything about the commercial seems designed to convey a lack of excitement.
Not counting Ed’s red power tie, you could do …read more

I know football season just started … but it’s not too early to start thinking about the Super Bowl.
We’re not talking spending extra time trying to win a couple hundred bucks in your fantasy football pool.
As long as you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big. The folks at Frito-Lay are giving you the opportunity to do just that.
Building on the success of last year’s Crash the Superbowl promotion, where the company turned complete control of its Superbowl ad time over to hardcore Dorito-eaters (which, face it, is pretty much everyone who’s not on …read more

The people at vitaminwater have a bold new program.
And it has nothing to do with the unique way they user only lower case letters and highlight the typeface in the name of their product.
They’re throwing down the creative gauntlet (or maybe just giving their flavor-inventors some time off) as they let you, the consumer, design the next big thing in vitaminwater land.
Utilizing a “flavor creator lab” on Facebook and a white-coated female avatar who speaks with a Bogart-style lisp, the folks at vitaminwater have pretty much reinvented their entire web presence around the program which gives water lovers …read more

When you think about tough, macho dudes the first thing that pops into your head usually isn’t a couple of guys putting fabric softener in their laundry.
Thanks to a new ad for Downy Ultra, that thought still won’t find a home in your cranium.
Although the new fabric softener commercial doesn’t conjure up images of middle linebackers, it may get you to chuckle enough to give the new and improved offering from Downy a shot.
The new spot is from the Hispanic marketing agency, Wing, and features two guys in a laundromat doing what you’d expect two guys in a laundromat to …read more

The two most easily controlled costs in major corporations are personnel and advertising.
Sure, you can re-tape envelopes and copy on both sides of a memo, but if you want to make a real difference in the bottom line, you need to cut costs with a chainsaw and not a nail clipper. Personnel and advertising cuts will generally give you the biggest bang for your buck.
Companies continue to make sizable cutbacks in both areas. The latest company to announce draconian cuts in marketing and labor costs in an effort to maintain profitability is American Express. The …read more

If they don’t already have a damage-control team at Continental Airlines, they may want to start shopping around.
The airline suffered its third major accident in less than a year when a Continental flight traveling from Brazil to Houston hit turbulence and was forced to make an emergency landing in Miami. Early reports cite at least 26 injuries and list at least four of those injuries as “serious.”
This accident follows on the heels of a Continental Connection crash outside of Buffalo earlier this year which killed all 45 passengers on board and a Continental flight out of Denver …read more

The magpie is a bird with black-and-white plumage. The dictionary characterizes the birds as possessing “noisy, mischievous habits.”
Kind of like the Ashton Kutchers of the bird world.
Wikipedia describes the birds as “opportunistic scavengers that will eat anything once they have discovered it is edible.”
Twitter users who cling to the notion of Twitter as a pure social networking destination will think both descriptions are appropriate for the advertising service, Magpie.
Magpie bills itself as “the largest Twitter Advertising Network” and says they are all about “generating a conversation for your brand within a …read more

You could have 100 ad agencies working overtime for a month and still not come up with an ad that would make you half as interested in synchronized swimming as this YouTube video of the Spanish synchronized swim team performing to Stairway to Heaven.
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My second fantasy is to be able to hold my breath that long….
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The amount of time I’ve spent watching synchronized swimming in my life is roughly equivalent to the amount of time I can tread water in the deep end of a pool. That’s nowhere near the five and a half minutes it takes these women …read more

The new, supposedly way-cool Gatorade commercials debuted earlier this year and asked, “What is G?” The answer, apparently, is that G is for “Gaffe” … with a capital “G.”
Parent company PepsiCo managed to take a mature sports drink which owned its category and accelerate its decline with the kind of so-hip-that-nobody-gets-it advertising that wreaks havoc with any brand.
It’s the Entourage effect brought to advertising. Only the people who work on the campaign think it’s slick. They’re so convinced of their own coolness they don’t realize they just come off as a bunch of preening idiots. …read more