May I pleeeease use this? (I mean, even if I don’t give credit?) 
And yeah, the ad is kinda sucky, but I tend to feel that way about most advertising.
While we’re on the subject, did you know there’s a special all new episode of Friday Night Lights tonight at 9/8 central? OMG!
I watch more commercials during the baseball postseason than during the whole rest of the year (because baseball’s something I don’t want to tape and watch later), and there were a lot of commercials I got sick of pretty quickly after seeing them over and over and over again. This is but one (or two) of them. And darn you to heck for reminding me of it, so that now that song’s going to be running through my head all day.
I’m guessing you and I aren’t the target audience for this ad, though. It’s an ad for Chevy trucks, and it’s aimed at people who drive pickup trucks, and wear cowboy hats and wave the flag and love motherhood and apple pie and listen to patriotic country songs and sit on their front porches drinking lemonade after putting in a hard day’s work.
I was shreiking about this last night during SNF. WTF is the deal? If they have to show it, do they have to show it EVERY commercial break for an entire quarter? After the third time I muted through all of the commercials because it was making me insane. I’d rather hear:
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead!
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead!
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead!
Yeh, they need to add some pizazz.
They’re not. The ad is for Chevy trucks. For the past couple of years, the advertising tag line for Chevys in general is “An American Revolution”. Now what the hell might be revolutionary about Chevrolets is an open question, but it seems pretty clear that the Viet Nam/hippie protester images are supposed to evoke this slogan. Well, then there’s the OTHER open question as to whether generally conservative pickup truck drivers would respond to this sort of thing , but whatever.
Regarding the Katrina/WTC stuff, the advert prominently features a bunch of people driving into a site for a barn-raising or some such thing. The idea here, although not exactly carried out with the greatest of clarity, seems to be that any time something happens that might lay another country low, we all pile into our Chevy trucks and hustle on out to rebuild whatever it is that got trashed in some form or other.
Oh, yeah, and does anyone notice, in one scene, that JCM is crooning his little tune in front of a rusted, broken down old Chevy pickup? Surely that got to be about the first time a vehicle manufacturer has ever implied that their stuff, you know, eventually wears out.
And now, having thoroughly deconstructed a 30-second ad spot that everyone (including me) loathes, I’m off to look for a life somewhere.
I am not a big fan of sentimental patriotism or of trucks or of country music or down-home-Americana or regular-guy-Bubba-lifestyles. I’m not a big fan of Chevrolet or of television commmercials.
All that being said …
It’s not a terrible song or a particularly bad commercial. Rather run-of-the-mill really.
Why all the hate?
Pizazz? I’d say the Camry and Accord are among the most vanilla cars on the road, but they’re also among the most popular in their class, if not the most popular. And air time for their ads seems pretty light.
Just make some truly excellent cars, for fuck’s sake. The rest kind of takes care of itself.
An autoweek article on the intent on the promotion.
Judging by this thread, it looks like they hit the mark they were aiming for.
From the article :
"If you want to make a statement that rings true with the majority of people, you are going to piss off some people. There are a lot of cynical people out there who don’t react well to this, and a lot of people who will never get behind the wheel of a pickup.
“So let them get into their Volvo sedans and complain about this spot that they see as exploitive,” he says. “This is not for them. The biggest risk you can take is to play it safe.”
It’s a sappy, overly jingo-istic ad, but that’s to be expected from a car company. I just wish they’d kill their embarrassingly bad flying car ad. Like, WTF does a flying car have to do with an extended warranty? The whole thing looks like it was conceived by a 3 year old.
Right. They really don’t care if dudes who weren’t going to buy a Chevy Truck in the 1st place don’t like the ad. Their test market show that their target market *will * like the ad. Whether or not this translates to significantly higher sales is another thing entirely.
Actually, I do have Bob Seger in the TuneSelect on my XM radio. I blame my parents.
Here’s the weird thing: I drove a Chevy truck for 5 years before buying my (used) Malibu. I’m the kind of person they’d be marketing toward: young, likes Chevrolets, has driven a Chevy truck in the past. This commercial makes me want to set fire to the 2007 Silverado.
I don’t get the “American Revolution” tagline, unless George Washington actually crossed the Delaware in a Chevy Nomad. Did Thomas Jefferson drive a Bel Air?
Why does this remind me of the South Park episode where Alan Jackson was singing, “Where were you when they built a ladder to heaven?”
This is why the song has nothing to do with how crappy the commercial is. By wallowing in bullshit nostalgia, knee-jerk patriotic pandering, and touchy-feely image-whoring of real life news events, this commercial on mute would be horrible in a way that no song could either redeem or further detract from in any significant way.
Share and Enjoy!
It’s like the Democrats and Republicans joined forces to create an election campaign for Chevy.
“Osama bin Laden drives a Toyota.”
Nissan indeed has a shaky track record - Altimas were shit in the '90s, and I’ve read horrible things about the Murano - but what has Mazda ever done wrong?
They share engineering with Fords (the Ford Fusion is a rebadged Mazda 3-series) and Ford engineering is less than spectacular.
I’ve heard complaints from friends who own Mazdas, too, about things breaking.
The Murano is actually quite nice, and surprisingly rugged, given its unabashed “pretend off-roader” styling and design.
My dad has one, and it’s one of very few vehicles left on the northeast side of Grand Cayman during the hurricanes which were still drivable (or even upright) afterward.