GM’s ad ‘calendar’ has me venting
Pick up a magazine lately and you’ll know what has me flipping out. No, it’s not the Gosselins. It’s the heavy duty, card-stock, glossy ads that weigh down the publication and make it hard to flip pages.
One such ad, really got me irate. It’s for the new GM Terrain SUV. While, I am glad to see GM using the bailout money to move away from monster SUVs, I wonder how much this ad set them back.
Actually, I’m not even sure you can call it an ad so much as a brochure. I would expect to see something like it in a showroom. The front is mostly white with “GMC Terrain” at the top and the phrase “We gave it more ideas per square inch, because more is what we do.” If more is what they do, then why is this page so minimalist? No picture, no easy-to-remember catch phrase. The regular reader would pass this by and not give a second thought to the interactive engineering awaiting them inside.
Open the brochure and you find a picture of the car. But, wait, it can’t be just a picture and text. No, parts of the car have little panels that the reader can open to find more information. I opened one by the rear window to read, “Available programmable power liftgate.” Below that by the bumper, I opened the door to find, “Standard rear vision camera.” I opened up another to find that I won a free medium fry at McDonalds (sorry, wrong campaign).
The car sounds quite innovative. You know what doesn’t sound innovative? This advertising campaign. Where have I seen it before? Oh, I don’t know, an Advent calendar, perhaps?
That’s right, instead of opening up a door a day while waiting for Christmas, you can open up a door on a new GMC Terrain to discover special features that could just have easily been labeled off to the side.
Will someone who is actually in the market for a Terrain want to interact with promotional materials like a kid hoping to find chocolate behind a numbered door on an Advent calendar? My money says the answer’s not behind door number two.