Don't Show Me Shit* Your Truck Can't Do

Shut up, Peppy.

Welcome back to The Short Shift, everybody!

I like wacky executions of good ideas. The quirkier the better, especially if they actually support or highlight the product being sold. Show me some elves making my delicious snacks; show me Mayhem causing some vehicular recklessness**; show me cartoon scrubbers whisking away the horrible, depressing filth of my bathroom; show me Terry Crews growing Terry Crewses out of himself for no reason whatsoever to sell deodorant. The world needs all the Terry Crewses it can get.

Surround your product with whimsy as much as you want, as long as you present the product itself in an honest and straight-forward manner. It can make a dull, utilitarian product as fun to engage with for 30 seconds as anything else.

AND NOW I IMMEDIATELY START COMPLAINING ABOUT SOMETHING

Don’t do this:

If you’re thinking about doing this, just don’t. Don’t sell a product, especially a car or truck, products that have very specific guidelines about what they can and cannot safely do, by literally showing it doing shit that it cannot possibly do.

Oh, what was that, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles?

You’ve done this before?

Well, isn’t that just spectacular.

“Here’s our client’s product doing stuff it can’t actually do. Being used in a way that would cause death. But look! Humorous disclaimers!”

Great unique selling position, you guys! A little more work, and I’m sure you can work in one of those winking emoticons that all the kids are crazy about.*** You know, the kind that do barrel rolls and shit.****

In the end, this approach isn’t witty, it’s not informative and it’s not fair to people taking the 30 seconds out of their lives to watch your spot. Sure, maybe it’s entertaining the first time (“oh hey, never saw that before“), but after that, it’s just a dumb cartoon without any informative or aesthetic value (“oh hey, on second thought, I would kinda die a lot that way“). Don’t sell what you think is a cool commercial at the expense of your big-ticket item; show the promise the product makes and how it delivers, not some “cool story, bro!” shaky cam shenanigans.

Car Heaven: Where Creativity Goes to Die

The last car ad that really caught my attention, out in the real world, through a sea of TV spots (featuring, I don’t know, ghosts driving the cars. Where are the drivers?) along the rain slicked Pacific Coast Highway, or print ads featuring sedans floating in what I can only assume to be car heaven (I guess that’s were all those ghosts were driving to), was an ad on the back of this month’s Food & Wine. It’s an ad for Buick, one of the least exciting brands I can think of, ever. There’s some cute wordplay in the copy where they’ve crossed out the “B” in Buick and put a Q in front, spelling out “QUICK”. It’s playful, if not that creative, considering the copy is over a standard image of a Buick racing down some Golden Hour drive at Blur Level: Plaid.

But, you know, there’s something more to the ad. Under the bit-too-on-the-nose copy (“Hope you like motion blur”) is a dude, beaming in the most golden of lighting and ratios.

Here’s the ad, in all its iPhone3-photo glory:

Bask in the radiance of BOTH MEGAPIXELS

There’s the guy, ostensibly smiling at all the “QBUICK” he’s taking in (seriously, who’s driving all these cars?). Is it spectacularly original? No, but look: it’s a human being enjoying an actual, tangible feature of the car.

Refreshing.

One could argue that Nissan spots are selling the sense of excitement that the truck delivers, the power of the brand, but that line of thought becomes strained:

"Hello, I heard you were considering a barrel roll. Please take this opportunity to reconsider."

Ok, so you promise me a sense of adventure and excitement brought on by doing flips and shit, can I do that too? Does my Nissan grant me the power to do barrel rolls?

The line of thought then comes to a calamitous end as a murder of Nissan lawyers crashes through the roof, alight with the flames of a thousand foreseeable lawsuits. They squawk out disclaimers, winking to each other in smug satisfaction.

Anyway, here are some incredible pieces that I stole off of some more dedicated person’s blog, some of them featuring people, some of them featuring notpeople. I hope you enjoy them (with more here):