Automotive advertising has its share of hits and misses. One of the brightest moments is what William Bernbach did for Volkswagen in the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, the 1-minute-long spot featured in this story is arguably one of the worst ads we’ve ever laid our eyes upon. Yup, that bad.
The ingredients of this spot are a girl with no sense of direction, a haunted house, some ghosts, ominous music, a question, and an answer. The question is “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a warning before bad things happen?” If he had lived, Hitchcock would’ve been extremely disappointed with the twist given to the horror movie genre by today's advertising agencies.
The answer comes in the form of “With an impressive array of active safety features, the all-new 2016 Chevy Malibu and Chevy Cruze can help you avoid danger.”
Gee, we couldn’t see that coming, nuh-uh. If this is how Chevrolet tries to raise awareness about the newest safety technologies available on its current crop of cars, the effort was all in vain. Sam Raimi, the man who created the Evil Dead series, directed the 60-second spot. It’s hard to understand why it turned out to be such a flop, but then again, Raimi directed the appalling Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maguire.
Paul Edwards, the U.S. vice president of Chevrolet Marketing, tries to convince us that, with this ad, the golden bowtie has “thrown a twist into that quintessential, edge of your seat horror movie moment to highlight the comprehensive suite of available active safety technologies in our new Malibu and Cruze.”
Dear Chevrolet, let’s forget for a second that the plot is poor and the catchline is lousy. The decision to screen the spot in 2,300 theaters is the bigger flop because, as anyone who goes to the movies knows, the slew of ads before a movie starts is the most annoying part of going to the theater.
P.S.: This cinema spot follows a recall campaign involving 473,000 pickup trucks and SUVs. According to General Motors, the brake pedals could fail due to a defective nut. Now that’s what we call a horror story.
After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well. Full profile
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