An Open Letter To Chevy - Democratic Underground

Plaid Adder

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Fri Mar-31-06 01:36 PM
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An Open Letter To Chevy

Edited on Fri Mar-31-06 01:37 PM by Plaid Adder

My Chevy Tahoe ad appears to have been deleted. But I'm not angry. Here's my letter of appreciation to the good people of Chevy:

Dear Chevy et al.,

I would like to express from the bottom of my heart my appreciation for the fine team of web designers and publicity flacks who put together the Chevy/Apprentice ad contest. It has given me many hours of joy and allowed me to bring laughter and comfort to friends of mine who are nearly terminally depressed about the state of the country and the accelerating pace of climate change. Although this was not, of course, your objective in setting up the contest, I want you to know that I appreciate it, and will always think fondly of Chevy for that reason. I will never, of course, buy a Chevy Tahoe, but then that was never going to happen anyway.

I would also like to say that I do not believe that the people who created and executed this concept should be fired. They have done a masterful job. An entire segment of the population has been reached that could never have been tapped through traditional advertising methods. The real stroke of genius was in making it so easy for people with no skills or experience to craft, at no expense and in about five minutes, an advertising spot that is virtually indistinguishable from the ones for which you pay several million dollars each in production costs and air time. How often do us peons get the opportunity to play with the master's tools? Thanks to you, hundreds of people who have neither the technology nor the know-how to produce the kind of slick, deceptive, manipulative advertising constantly used against them by their political opponents and corporate overlords finally got to produce their own advocacy ads at your expense. Our time was brief; but it was oh so sweet.

The other stroke of genius was in providing us with all those images of the Chevy Tahoe lumbering all over pristine natural landscapes--including all those glacial fields of blue so strongly reminiscent of the melting polar icecaps. You, of course, originally crafted these images in order to try to persuade prospective buyers that the Chevy Tahoe is, as you would say, a "responsible" purchase, and in perfect harmony with the environment. This is in fact the central irony at the core of the SUV craze: the vehicle that gets you to the wilderness is also the vehicle that destroys it. It's a beautiful paradox, and that's what inspired me and so many of your other contest entrants. Every one of those images is a veil that half-conceals, half-reveals that delicious irony; we could see it glimmering through the slick coating of smugness like the beautiful face of a sleeping princess inside a glass casket. All she needed to be brought back to life was the tender kiss of the text. How could anyone resist?

In short, these fine people created an advertising campaign that does more than reach out--it draws people in, addictively and obsessively, as they return again and again to excavate the layers of rich meaning encoded into each one of those images. It is diabolically effective, spreading like wildfire, drawing eyeballs back to your product and your logo over and over again. What matter that the messages conveyed are not to your liking? Isn't all publicity good publicity? And won't it be useful to you to have discovered, albeit by accident and against your will, what the vast numbers of people out there who are not buying your product really think of it?

So don't fire these people, Chevy. Promote them. It'll be good for General Motors--and good for the country!

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

P.S. Here is one of my favorite lines from Rear Window: "When the president of General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country is ready to let go." Think you can use it in your next Tahoe campaign? I hope so!