{"id":1010,"date":"2005-02-06T13:45:55","date_gmt":"2005-02-06T13:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2005-02-06T13:45:55","modified_gmt":"2005-02-06T13:45:55","slug":"gm_auto_marketi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=1010","title":{"rendered":"GM Auto Marketing: Find Your Style (Wife, Girlfriend, Mistress)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/photos\/2005\/02\/gm\/gmfindyourstyle022005.jpg\" TITLE=\"GM Billboard: US101 Southbound, South San Francisco, CA, Just North of SFO Airport\"><br \/>\nDriving back to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flysfo.com\/\">SFO<\/a> recently, I noticed this GM (General Motors) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/photos\/2005\/02\/gm\/gmfindyourstylesfo101.jpg\">billboard<\/a>.   In essence, the message to Northern California drivers bound either for SFO or their jobs on the Peninsula or in Silicon Valley was:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A <a href=\"http:\/\/clusty.com\/search?query=%22chevy+ssr%22\">Chevy SSR<\/a> is for  your wife.\n<li>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.saabusa.com\/\">Saab<\/a> is for your girlfriend\n<li> A <a href=\"http:\/\/clusty.com\/search?query=%22Cadillac+XLR%22\">Cadillac XLR<\/a> coupe is for your mistress\n<li>Visit <a href=\"http:\/\/www.findyourstyle.com\">www.findyourstyle.com<\/a> to figure this out.<\/ul>\n<p>Advertising is often a useful way to peer into the soul of a company, or in other words, think about their dna and how the firm views its interaction with the outside world.  <\/p>\n<p>This campaign smells desperate to me.  I&#8217;m reminded of Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy&#8217;s spot on statement regarding software:  <i>&#8220;The quality of a company&#8217;s software has an inverse relationship to the amount spent on marketing.&#8221;<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I must admit that this ad campaign doesn&#8217;t click at all for me, from any angle. The whole pitch, including the website, seems like a lot of fluff.  I visited the site and it promptly crashed my computer (PC, in this case).   I tried again and it worked, although it later crashed just my browser.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps this all makes sense for some car buyers&#8230;..<\/p>\n<p>I think GM would be much better off seeding cars to bloggers and schools for long term reviews (with the agreement that they write about their year or two with a sedan, minivan, SUV or sports car).  This will take some doing, but I think it would be money well spent.  Essentially, they need to route around the legacy media (see Bob Lutz&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/fastlane.gmblogs.com\/archives\/2005\/02\/best_in_class_t.html\">notes<\/a> on this).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Driving back to SFO recently, I noticed this GM (General Motors) billboard. In essence, the message to Northern California drivers bound either for SFO or their jobs on the Peninsula or in Silicon Valley was: A Chevy SSR is for your wife. A Saab is for your girlfriend A Cadillac XLR coupe is for your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,28,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}