Is there a good source of information on the Web that can tell me which advertising agency is responsible for a particular television ad campaign?
Inspired by this thread, New Bizarre BUICK Advert!, I’ve been wondering which agency came up with the craptastic Harley Earl campaign.
Was it the same one that did the really creepy Chevy commercial in which the guy waits in his car until the end of Don McLean’s American Pie (“That’ll be the day that I diiiiiiiiieeeee…”) before joining his girlfriend for their final walk into the surf?
And who did that Mitsubishi ad with the spastic dancing girl in the passenger seat?
Somebody needs to be held to account! I want names!
Thanks, digs, I’ll have to check out that site some more.
In any event, it looks like the people responsible for disinterring the body of Harley Earl are McCann-Erickson. Check out this press release from GM: http://www.gm.com/cgi-bin/pr_display.pl?3195
Of course, at least some of the blame for these ads has to go to the director. From the same site
By the time Tony Scott got involved, the decision to reanimate a designer unknown to 99.9% of the population had long since been made. Blame him for the lighting effects if you like, but I’d be surprised if he were involved in the campaign at the concepting phase.
Now I’m curious. Why do you think it’s their final walk? Are they breaking up, or going to drown themselves, or what? I’m seriously asking, because I hate it when I miss the subtext in a 30-second commercial.
The Harley Earl campaign baffles me (assuming the idea is to make people want to buy Buicks).
And I want to know who the hell thought up the new one for some sort of SUV with the two guys in it, where the passenger starts choking on food and the driver speed up, then slams on the brakes and the offending piece of food goes splattering onto the windshield. Not only is it not funny to watch someone choking, but this was just plain disgusting. And it doesn’t make me want to buy the damn vehicle. I was so distracted by the grossness that I can’t even remember which car it was.
The first time I saw that ad, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. One of my more fanciful theories was that the couple were about to commit suicide. The despondent-looking young woman on the beach and the man listening to American Pie by himself just seemed creepy to me. What really made me wonder, though, was the tagline: “Until the very end, we’ll be there. Chevrolet.”
Now, obviously, no car-maker wants you to think their vehicle is the perfect machine to drive to your Final Destination, but the fact that I considered the possibility that the ad actually was about a suicide attempt makes me think the ad agency missed their target. Of course, if I’m the only person in the world who got that vibe, they might not have missed it by much…
And, by the way, that ad seems to have been the product of the Campbell-Ewald agency. The director was Noam Murro. The best online reference I’ve found is a cached page from AdWeek on Google which, on preview, I can’t seem to provide a link for. Do a search on “‘American Pie’ Campbell-Ewald” and it should come up.
Isn’t that one for one of those satellite radio companies? XM-Radio or some such? Jeez, how do you get that they’re going to commit suicide?
She’s waiting for him to finish listening to the song, and then they’re going for a walk on the beach. It’s just a freaking commercial. I think you’re reading waaaaay too much into it.
Man, sometimes I think those ad biz guys are on heroin! Instead of sticking to telling us what might be good about Buicks, they resurrect a long-dead designer (Harley earl), and match him up with Tiger Woods!
I can understand why Buick needs to change their target audience…Volkswagen was in a similar fix years ago (remember when Volkswagen ads were geared to cheapskate eccentrics who wanted everybody to know how much they liked their weird cars)! Volkswagen changed 180 degrees-they are now courting the 22-30 age group, and have won back a huge share of that market.
Buick coulddo the same…if only they didn’t have ads with guys from the 1930’s, and a dead guy wearing fedoras and two-tone shoes!
I’m wondering about the JCPenney ads. They manage to be insulting to every population segment. I can’t imagine seeing or hearing one of the ads and thinking that JCPenney is for you instead of thinking “morons.”
The ad with the woman dancing (or having convulsions, it’s hard to tell…) in the passenger seat of a Mitsubishi Eclipse was the work of Interpublic Group of Cos.'s Deutsch, Los Angeles. More information about this ad is here: http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=34194.
While I may have thought this ad was a loser, my opinion doesn’t seem to be shared by the advertising industry. In fact, Deutsch won Advertising Age’s 2002 Agency of the Year award. There’s an article about it here: http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=36844. The head of the agency, Donny Deutsch, does seem to be a bit of a loon, though:
The reporter who wrote that was Lisa Sanders.
Real classy. Strip to the waist in front of a reporter of the opposite sex during an interview…
On the David Chappelle show he has a skit making fun of the convulsing/dancing girl. He’s driving, she’s dancing, he keeps giving her strange looks and finally pulls over and yells ‘Get out!’ until she does, then drives off. He then says to himself ‘Damn crazy dancing makes my penis soft’.
Oooooh, I HATE those ads. The “Where is your mother?” commercials!
Dumb father can’t handle taking care of the kids while spendthrift mother is out racking up the credit card. Grrrr! :mad:
How about the one where the driver keeps tapping the brakes to make the passenger spill coffee just as he’s taking a sip? Yup – our cars are for assholes.