Perhaps you have seen them. The eminently cute teaser ads that are all about numbers. I ran across them on my low-budget alternative to cable television, Hulu.com, and couldn't figure it out, at first, what I was being teased about. I wondered if this was GM touting the new Chevy Volt. "Couldn't be," I surmised, "as the Volt doesn't hit showrooms until late 2010 and no one would be foolish enough to start advertising a new car over a year before you could buy one.... would they?"
Turns out I was wrong. The ads were, indeed, for the new Volt. What a disappointment. As I have recalled in several posts, I am in advertising. I may not be Hal Riney, but I have enough successes (Yea, I know I lost Bear Stearns, but ads had nothing to do with their demise) behind my belt to know when a concept behind an ad campaign is flawed, and this one takes the cake. Here's why.
I cannot understand, for the life of me, why you advertise something nobody can buy. Oh, I can hear the rational now in the GM marketing meetings that "we'll start the 'buzz' now to ensure a successful introduction." Maybe 60 days out. But over 15 months from the debut? This is insanity.
And it gets worse. The 230 MPG figure ( the happy electrical socket reads as a zero) is GM's, not the EPA. I hope to god they don't have to restate those figures. Promises. Promises. Promises. Nothing like the "New" GM behaving like the "old" GM ("Just wait until you see what we have coming down the pike in the future!").
Actually, I spoke too soon. The ad was not so much a teaser, as it perhaps was the truth.
From T. Blumer at BizzyBlog: "Yesterday, GM filed an 8-K report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s an 8.9 mb behemoth that will crash your Adobe Acrobat if you’re not careful. Among other things, it has 11 pages discussing risk factors, including an astonishing admission that the company’s “lack of effective internal controls could materially affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plans”; over 30 pages of minutiae relating to executive compensation; detailed information about unit sales; and over 3,000 pages of exhibits, including various agreements between the company and the United States Treasury."
But there are no second-quarter financials. Not even revenues.
Could it be that GM lost 23 billion in the second quarter?
That would be shocking!
Not.
Whoa, what a post. I'm thinking you might be more right than wrong. I want to see GM succeed, but not at the cost of the taxpayer.
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I imagine that we will never know what the new GM spends on advertising, especially when the government is picking up the tab. I wish I felt better about a car company I grew up with.
ReplyDeleteTHE VOLT IS GM'S EDSEL.
ReplyDeleteThe "Leaf" from Nisson gets over 400 mpg's. so there.
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