Chevy's Viral Marketing Gaffe

Chevy recently launched an advertising campaign designed to become fodder for viral marketing, as detailed in yesterday's New York Times.  Instead, the campaign is quickly becoming fodder for late night hosts.

In the campaign, tied to television’s The Apprentice, users are provided a set of tools to storyboard a pseudo commercial for the Chevy Tahoe.  Users can string together choices from a selection of short video segments, adding text and background music.  The resulting “commercial” is saved, and links can be emailed to friends or colleagues.

Clearly, Chevy did not understand the dynamics of the market most likely to use the application – teenagers and young adults.  While Chevy may have envisioned users creating ads touting the Tahoe’s spacious interior, ample seating or rugged looks, that’s not what most of the users were thinking about.  Instead, they leveraged the desert scenes, ice capped mountains and waterfall imagery to drive satirical snippets focused on the war in Iraq and global warming.  For an example of how this works, take a look at the example that I created.

The good (or bad) news is that, as designed, these commercials have spread virally, as users share their creativity with friends.  Unfortunately, most of them do not contain the mom, apple pie and Chevrolet message that might have been originally intended.  This should not have come as a surprise to Chevy.  All it would take is a 15-minute tour of You Tube to see that satire and parodies (along with way too much lip-synching) are the core elements of this genre.

Perhaps Chevy will claim that all publicity is good publicity, but I disagree.  While You Tube parodies like Brokeback to the Future may have provided benign publicity to the underlying film, the Tahoe commercial parodies will not cast a positive light on Chevy.

The clear message here is that it’s critical for business professionals to use and understandnew innovations in technology.  Spend an hour watching You Tube, create a page on MySpace, set up an RSS reader and begin to read blogs.  It’s not enough to simply understand the capabilities of these tools.  It’s critical that you understand how they are being used, the culture of the users and the potential implications of your efforts.  I’m guessing that few within Chevy’s advertising and marketing team had done so.

P.S. If you'd like to create your own Tahoe ad (or parody), you have until Monday to do so at the special  Chevy website.

Comments

[Cityzen Jane]

Hi!

Just a note, some of us parodists are not kids - though I am hanging on to the adjective 'young' for as long as I can!

We are net savvy and brand savvy - and we know that we can 'brand back'... as it where. We have been marketed to and at since before we were born and we are not happy about it. We are not happy with the world we are left with...and the products we are encouraged to buy.

I can't tell you how miserable and sick I feel everytime I see an SUV driving through pristine wilderness on TV. It doesn't represent freedom so much as desecration.