Evil advertising: General Motors and Everclear

Evil enough that -- I think -- the ad’s creative team may have missed the point of Everclear’s song. I’ve always been particularly struck by this verse (which doesn’t appear in the ad):

I’d be in bed with the radio on
I would listen to it all night long
Just to hear my favorite song
You’d have to wait but you could hear it on the am radio

[from LyricsFreak.com]

Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t this sorta saying that that was fun, to lie awake all night waiting for a song you loved to come on? I know it was for me, when I was a kid, and that it really isn’t the same thing today to be able to play a favorite song -- on a CD or an MP3 or whatever -- whenever I want. It was the anticipation and the waiting that made it extra sweet when you did finally hear that song. (There was an interesting discussion on Plastic last year about the misuse of pop and rock songs in advertising...) Hard to imagine that there was a time, and it was only 35 years ago, when instant gratification was not possible in all aspects of American culture. (Not that it’s not seductive -- I’m currently engaged in a geeky debate with myself over whether I should order the new Doctor Who DVD set from Amazon.ca or let myself enjoy the sweet misery of weekly anticipation while it unreels on SciFi...)

But it’s not the idea that maybe everything new isn’t necessarily cool that is so wrongheaded about the GM spot: It’s how evilly catchy it is. Purely as media experience, the ad is brilliant -- I love it every time I see it. Even though I know how mendacious it is to suggest that that same company that produces Hummers for the mass market:

...is the same one that’s gonna save us from our gas-guzzling ways:

For GM to position itself as totally pro ecology and saving the Earth, yo, is so deceptive as to be outright criminal, particularly when you know that the asinine federal laws governing these things mean that, as TerraPass’s TerraBlog points out:

AFE stands for Corporate Average Fuel Economy, and, as the name implies, the standard sets benchmarks for the average fuel economy that car manufacturers must achieve across their entire fleets.

The problem is that manufacturers have no incentive to exceed the CAFE standards, so every hybrid car they sell gives them the opportunity to peddle another gas guzzler to less environmentally-conscious consumers.

Keep that in mind next time you’re boogeying to GM’s ad.