Ad agency for feel good add about two friends driving red VW Microbus around to all major league ballparks… $1.4 million.
Air time to show commercial nationally… $53.8 million
Cost of payout from lawsuit brought by the two real baseball fans who actually self-made a documentary about themselves traveling around the country in a red VW Microbus to visit all major league ballparks… priceless
I mean, what was this agency thinking??? Let’s set the WayBack[sup]R[/sup] machine to Madison Avenue and visit the think tank session.
underling: I have an idea, boss. Let’s make a commercial about going to all major league ballparks, exactly like those two kids in Minnesota did.
boss: Hmmmm… Potential lawsuit… heart warming images… nostalgia of VW Microbus… That’s so crazy it just might work!
And actually, to MasterCard’s credit (ha!), the original docuboys only visited about 6 stadiums. But the style they used was near identical to that used by MC.
Did MasterCard ever finish that series of ads with one showing those two goobers reaching their 30th and final ballpark? The last one I saw was the Seattle ad, where there were 28 parks down and 2 to go. I’m guessing there was a final ad that aired during the World Series, and I didn’t see it (I didn’t see much of the Series). If they did that last ad, what was the last ballpark?
Well, I have friends who fantasized about this long before these other guys went public. Admittedly, there was no microbus in their little fantasy, but it’s hardly like those two documentary fellows were the first people to ever consider such a pilgrimage.
They shoulda just put those slackers in the commercial in a different sort of beater.
I didn’t see the last ballpark one (bummer!), but the very last one was set after it was all over. I don’t remember exactly where they were though. I wish I could remember… UGH!
Naw, the last one was a tally of all the money they spent on different things, and the final line was something like “two friends, one summer, 30 ballparks, priceless.”
I’m very unhappy to learn that it was a rip-off. I liked those commercials, too.
I knew a couple of guys in college that the year after graduation, spent 2 months and hit soemthing like 10 different parks driving around the country. And this was in 1985, long before either Mastercard or the two guys in Minnesota hit the scene.
