Imagine if your alarm clock was powered by gas or coal or nuclear energy. Surprise! It is!
Nissan has a new ad campaign: Gas Powered Everything. The concept makes for amusing visuals as people start up their computers, hair driers, coffee makers, microwaves and whatnot with lawn mower-style pull cords. Smoke belches out as the combustion engines, which would normally run cleanly with the flip of a switch, power formerly electric devices with petroleum.
“Imagine if everything in your life ran on gas, from your alarm clock to your computer and even your cell phone,” says the YouTube description of the ad. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, everything does run on gas (or coal or nuclear energy), from my alarm clock to my computer and my cell phone! Even Nissan’s damn car runs on gas, though not directly.
America’s current power grid is run by three primary sources of fuel: Coal (45 percent), natural gas (20 percent) and nuclear (20 percent). In other words, electricity is not generated by electricity. It’s generated mostly by the Big Three of energy horrors that the environmental left would like us to dispense with so we can all live in grass huts and ride bikes everywhere.
You may as well fire up your alarm clock with a combustion engine because there’s a combustion engine somewhere that feeds a line into your home to fire that puppy up. But I suppose Nissan’s ad agency is betting that most Americans are ignorant of how electricity is actually generated.
I won’t even get into the unintended environmental consequences of manufacturing and disposing of these toxic battery-run vehicles, and that over the span of their lives they leave a larger carbon footprint.
The tag for the Nissan Leaf (the car’s name is another sign of the Apocalypse) is Innovation for the Planet. Which planet they refer to, I’m not sure, but it sure as hell isn’t this planet, a planet awash in fuels they claim are not used to power this car though they actually are.
Increasingly, it seems, the job of our nation’s ad agencies is to peddle and perpetuate urban legends, myths and half-truths so that corporations like Nissan can pat themselves on the back for being so “responsible” and “progressive.”
One in two people in Detroit are illiterate. There’s no better example of one-party Democratic rule and its ultimate end result than Detroit, Michigan. To get an idea about how terrible the literacy rate is just consider that the functional literacy rate in Kenya, Egypt, Iran, and India are all higher than Detroit.
At the end of the new taxpayer funded Chrysler Super Bowl commercial economist Eminem looks at the camera and says, “This is the Motor City and this is what we do.” I’m confused. Is what they do running a city into the ground or running the automobile industry into the ground?
The video below is by far the greatest commercial ever for a mobile home liquidation company. I’m not sure it’s effective, but at least people are talking about it. The Cullman Liquidation commercial has received over 2 million views on YouTube.
Every year during March Madness there’s one commercial that is played relentlessly on CBS. This piece will always hold a special place in my heart. There’s so much to say about this ad, but it speaks for itself.
Darius Rucker will always be a legend to me after this contribution to society.
Something special happened to me last week when I walked up my office vending machine. I needed some gum. Not just any gum, I needed something that was going to move me. Then I saw it, Juicy Fruit. Immediately I heard “the taste is gonna move you” in my head. I saw water sports and good times. I haven’t seen this commercial in around twenty years but it is crystallized into my memory.
I did an informal poll in my office with people who would be old enough to remember watching the video. I first asked people if they remembered the song. Then I’d ask them if they remembered the commercial. The answers broke down into gender lines. Some women remembered the song; others didn’t know what I was talking about. Among men however, the results were amazing. Not only did almost every man I talk to remember the song (Tom Harkin), but they also remembered that the commercial involved water sports.
I decided to investigate this commercial further. Why do men so fondly remember the commercial? My question was answered quite quickly. Juicy Fruit ran a series of sporty commercials during the 80′s. I’ve show the two above, plus they did one on snow skiing, mountain biking, and snowboarding. However, it appears the water skiing ad is the one all the men remember. It probably has to do with the woman in the picture. I also have noticed that there’s a man in the videos that looks remarkably like David Hasselhoff during the “take a sniff” line in almost every commercial. I have even found an Australian version of the commercial.
After careful consideration I believe that the Juicy Fruit commercials of the 80s were the most successful chewing gum campaign of all time. The marketers brilliantly fused sports, bikinis, Hasselhoff, and gum. It’s pure genius. I just wish it was still 25¢ for a pack of gum.
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