Huge Mercedes Ad Makes Saab Shrink

⌕ Can you see the Saabs down there? Use the arrow. Look closer. See?

Oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz/My friends all drive Saabs and they are so proud... Or at least they were, until they came face to face with the building-wide-and-high Mercedes Benz ad hanging over the entire (until recently) very proud Saab lineup.

The story goes a little bit like this. Saab, the former GM-owned Swedish manufacturer who came face to face with death in 2009 is, for reasons which are of no concern to us here, not an official North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) exhibitor. Meaning it has no display on the show's floor, no press conference during the event, no nothing.

This didn't stop the marketing guys working for the car maker to come up with a solution they probably thought at one point was brilliant: create a separate display, across the street from the COBO Center where NAIAS is taking place, on the patio of the former Hotel Pontchartrain.

Saab went to the scene, erected a few tents and brought there pretty much its entire lineup, hoping that the crowd coming to or leaving from the COBO Center would stop and have a look-see at their vehicles.

What they didn't know was that as they were planning their own auto show, German manufacturer Mercedes Benz wrapped the Pontchartrain building behind and above the patio in a huge SLS AMG billboard, for all Detroit to see.

As a result of this coincidence, all the Saabs below, renewed or revolutionary as they may be, paled under the opened gullwing doors of Mercedes' finest.

Guess the guys at Saab didn't take into account one very old, very true saying: it's all about location, location, location. And size, of course.