Learn to love Big Blue, the car of your dreams
This just in: I was shocked to see that President Barack Obama is telling Chrysler to cut its ad budget in half. Here's the story http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/14/no-joke-obama-setting-advertising-policy-for-chrysler/
OK, if you know me, you will recall that I voted for the old guy, John McCain. I call him the old guy because that was really the main problem that most people had with him. Even Chuck Norris said so.
Nevertheless, I attempt to be a fair and tolerant person. When Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000, I told my Democratic friends and family to stop griping and accept Bush as our president. Since I remember that, I refuse to be a hypocrite and keep complaining that McCain is not our president. Even though he truly had the foreign policy and tons of other experience needed to do the job.
Not to be sarcastic and totally insincere, but I really am trying to like this guy, Barack Obama. He is our president, and we must support him. Unless he turns into a Richard Nixon. But I don't believe that will ever happen; Obama is too intelligent.
Every time I start to warm up to him, though, he shows his freaking arrogance again. Has the president ever run a business? I know the car companies have made many egregious errors, but ... come on. Cutting advertising dollars will hurt the economy.
My true colors are showing again. To see what's happening to even the once-proud-but-now-biased New York Times really pains me. One of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid was "Lou Grant." Much as I dislike the actor Ed Asner, I wanted to be like Billie and the other reporters on that show. Root out evil and expose it for what it really is. Tell the truth. No matter what the costs. Without investigative journalism, who will watch over the scary leaders who might destroy our country?
Obama's decision cuts to the heart of capitalism and what America is all about. Do we put our faith in company executives or a man we elected but don't really know much about? Hasn't Chrysler been in business far longer than Obama's been commander in chief? Surely the corporation has done something right or it wouldn't have sold millions of cars for so many years.
I have to confess, I love Chrysler. My dream car is the 300. The Crossfire is also a beautiful creature, not just a sportscar. I will probably be buried with my 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It's the most reliable car I've ever driven, and I've had many cars.
Yeah, I drove just about every American car on the planet. I have the repair bills to prove it. A Ford Fairlane (yikes), a Chevy Cavalier wagon, even a Ford Escort. Yes, I suffered greatly. Believe it or not, I have never been the sole owner of a car built on foreign soil. Scary, isn't it?
I must admit I've been tempted by BMWs and Mercedes. Oooh, they are so gorgeous, so precise. I've flirted with a Jaguar, test driving it. Even an occasional Audi or Lexus might catch my eye. Yet for some reason, I have stuck with the red, white and blue.
When it comes to reliability, my three best performers were a 1979 Cadillac, a 1987 Chrysler Fifth Avenue and the Jeep. The Cadillac was probably T-boned in an accident before I cherished it, yet ran like a trouper and is probably still running somewhere on this planet, if there is a God.
My coworkers jeered at the Fifth Avenue, calling it Big Blue. Grandma's car, they were thinking. Yet it never left me alone on a busy road one early morning like the Ford Escort did. That car was an aberration. That's why Ford no longer makes them.
If you know anything about women, you'll know that we love cars that are reliable. We often fear breaking down somewhere late at night in the wrong part of town.
Chrysler, GM and Ford should be advertising and marketing reliable Big Blues to those women. After all, the minivan and the SUV are still two of the most popular vehicles ever sold in America.
Love it or leave it, that is America. Those big blue, sturdy cars. Embrace them.
[Your Name Here]
in Barack Obama, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Jeep, John McCain, advertising, budget, car
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Reader Comments (1)
Under normal circumstances this would shock me as well, but I delved a little deeper and found some of the reasoning behind it. One of the main reasons for cutting the ad budget was that Chrysler has not been paying BBDO and in fact BBDO is now the second largest creditor. Chrysler owes them $58.1 million so the ad agencies are not thrilled with doing the ads for fear they’ll never be paid. The other reason has to do with the ads they wanted to run. Even Ad Age criticized what Chrysler wanted to do. Chrysler wanted the $134 million to spend on ads that said everything at Chrysler was “business as usual” according to a VP of sales and marketing at Chrysler. Ad Age wrote, “Isn’t that what got American car companies in trouble in the first place? Business as usual gave us cars no one wanted to buy, zero innovation, outdated labor practices and a lot of taxpayer money thrown in to keep a sinking ship from going under. How about some unusual business—like a successful American car company?” The thinking is that the ads were going to reinforce the image that people already have in their minds of this being a company that cannot design cars as well as foreign companies and would actually be counterproductive. Even Ad Age agrees. It wasn’t really that Obama’s auto task force wanted to cut the ad budget, they just want to make sure the money is spent to actually push more sales and not just make the company look stuck even deeper in the rut they are in.