Thinking about a Global Positioning System for your car? Do you get a chuckle out of references to the movie, Deliverance? NexTel has a commercial for you.
Maybe you had to have lived in the South to appreciate it…
BBC News reports on the 16th international AIDS conference in Toronto – Gates: Women key to AIDS policy
“Obviously the Aids epidemic is going to require all actors, particularly governments, to dig deep and make this a high budgetary priority,” he said, in remarks before the opening. And he said progress in the development of microbicides offered real hope to millions of people: “A woman should never need her partner’s permission to save her own life. There’s progress on these, but the pace has been too slow.”
His call was echoed by Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy on Aids in Africa: “To change the sexual behaviour of men is a question of generations. Women are dying now.”
It might not be a question of generations if the right kind of advertising is used. Get Madison Avenue on the job. Make men who refuse to use condoms look like the selfish little babies that they are. Portray men who use condoms as the real grown-ups, the ones women really want to be with. Make the ads clever and funny and use viral marketing techniques.
In fact, that might be a pretty good alternate use of the $20m that they spent on the conference in Toronto. (Of course, go ahead and develop the microbicides in the meantime anyway)
When I saw Chrysler’s new commercials with “Dr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of Mercedes” making humorous explanations of Mercedes engineering in new Chrysler cars, I just assumed he was some actor. After all, he’s pretty darn smooth on camera. His humor is very fine-tuned. His mustasche is just a little too… He could be a stand-up comic or something.
According to the Chicago Tribune, it’s really him. He’s a really impressive guy: he’s an engineer, he speaks seven languages, he sailed the Atlantic in a sailboat, and yes, the mustache is real. Who knew?
The commercials poke fun at Dr. Z. A school child asks; “Is that mustache real?” An exasperated film director reminds him of his lines and exclaims; “Actors!” He ‘accidentally’ finds a J.D. Powers award in a Chrysler minivan. The website, Ask Dr. Z is hilarious.
Sorry, Dr. Z, I like your commercials, but I still don’t think much of Chrysler cars or even of Mercedes. The former have a long way to go, and the latter, while quite impressively engineered, are overrated for reliability and practicality of ownership. And the local Mercedes dealer here is a jerk, too. This is all from owners I know.
In fact, a friend of mine went online looking for a used minivan. He wanted something less than three years old. He found 1,400 Plymouth Voyagers… and one Honda Odyssey. That’s not advertising hype, it’s a bunch of owners who paid big bucks for a new Voyager, and traded them in within three years.
My friend bought a new Honda Odyssey. Don’t get him started, Dieter; he loves it.
I couldn’t find a video link, but the new Burger King commercial featuring a bunch of stereotypical men singing a transgendered version of Helen Reddy’s ‘I am woman, hear me roar…” is just too funny for words.
Not that it makes me any more likely to eat one of those thousand-calorie GreaseWhoppers, but at least it’s funny and not creepy like those ‘Wake up with the King’ commercials…
My son suggests a strategy for companies: use your commercial archive. Play new commercials for no more than a week and rotate through your archive of commercial favorites from the past (and play them for no more than a week). Then people would not be lunging for the ‘mute’ button during the 4-month overrun of your clever new commercial. People would stop what they’re doing to watch a 30-year-old McDonald’s commercial if they would only see it twice.
That boy is brilliant.
Update: Commenters who have dropped in on this post are much more interesting than the post itself, 
and one left a link to the video.