Chevy is back it at with another ridiculous ad strategy. Since their "make your own" Tahoe advert was a flop, Chevy and John "whatever-my-middle-name-is-today" Mellencamp have teamed up to try a new angle--capitalizing on American icons like Rosa Parks and MLK, and tragedies like 9/11 and Katrina, to sell their new Silverados. Seth Stevenson at Slate rolls up the newspaper and slaps Chevy in the nose with his assessment of the ad:
This ad makes me—and, judging by my e-mail, some of you—very angry. It's not OK to use images of Rosa Parks, MLK, the Vietnam War, the Katrina disaster, and 9/11 to sell pickup trucks. It's wrong. These images demand a little reverence and quiet contemplation. They are not meant to be backed with a crappy music track and then mushed together in a glib swirl of emotion tied to a product launch. Please, Chevy, have a modicum of shame next time.
Idolator had this to say in their so aptly titled post, 'John Mellencamp's controversial new song hurts so bad':
The video is creepily exploitative--we're pretty sure that Rosa Parks didn't get on the bus hoping that she'd be posthumously employed to sell pick-up trucks--and the song sounds like every other Mellencamp tune since 1992.
And SoulTek:
...GM is using images of 9/11 - an act largely produced by America's foreign oil dependency - to promote a gas guzzler and the apparent pride of foreign oil dependency.
And Jalopnik, who got their hands on an earlier version of the commercial, informs us that it originally showed a "scene of a mushroom cloud -- what we're assuming was a test of some sort -- then an image of duck n' coverin' kids doing just that under their desks." A nuclear explosion!
**BONUS** a few examples of Chevy's make-your-own Tahoe disaster:
