General Motors' SUV brand Chevy Tahoe recently launched a Consumer Generated Campaign, and it's backfiring.
The campaign allows you to create and customise your own ad about this new gas-guzzling, environmentally ludicrious SUV. Which is exactly what people are doing.
Blogs like Total Tactics give some great examples where people have created their own versions to reflect the environmental issues associated with buying an SUV. It's culture jamming at its best – and I think it's hysterical that GM paid for every cent of it.
As you can imagine, the folks over at GM are frantically censoring these entries, pulling down submissions as quickly as they're going up. And once you start doing that, you really are driving yourself into a brick wall.
If your brand is ethical, authentic, responsible and loved by your customers, that's great. You have nothing to worry about. Your loyal customers will spread your goodness like wildfire. But if your brand isn't exactly the nicest kid in the yard, people will spoof your ads, hijack your logo, and give you the negative publicity that you probably deserve.
Check mine out at
http://www.chevyapprentice.com/view.php?country=us&uniqueid=d831f264-1281-1029-98eb-0013724ff5a7
I like my second one better:
http://www.chevyapprentice.com/view.php?country=us&uniqueid=92804388-129a-1029-98eb-0013724ff5a7
These are excellent Shea! Never miss an opportunity for a plug – I hope you get plenty of SUV drivers on board.
I’m really looking forward to seeing offsetmylife tomorrow.
Damn, a couple of days away on my Tahoe
kept me away from comment moderation… You can see many more ads on the site now.
Hello. I hastily put up a site at
http://heavyonthechevy.crispynews.com where we’ve already ammassed a fairly large collection (100?) contributed by users from around the internet.
The site has a ranking feature, which lets people vote on the best commercials, so I hope the best ones do bubble up to the top here. Shea, for example, may be interested in putting her videos on the site. Hopefully we’ll get as many people as we can to hear the message. (and see people’s creativity!)
I love it!