The Big Lie, courtesy Prudential Financial Inc.
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20 January 2012
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23 November 2011
Samsung Galaxy S II Commercial
It’s not so much as making fun as Apple culture. It’s people not thinking rationally on this. They’re allowing a brand to define who they are. That’s not exclusive to Apple, either.
Samsung’s “VP of Strategic Marketing” wouldn’t be saying that if his company had a strong brand in the sought after market, but still—hooray for incidental truth telling. Branding is a massively powerful force that we really need to get our hands on, as a culture, unless we do want to devolve from humans into programmable consumers.
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15 October 2011
This ad is great. It shows drivers being dicks to pedestrians, which is a common occurrence. The smug woman laughing at the cyclist gave a pretty good idea of the kind of company GM is as well.
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6 September 2011
Stupid ZipCar gets in on the Cycling Ridicule game (via Most of the time you only need a bike. « Brooklyn Spoke)
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12 May 2011
Sometimes the evidence to disprove a desperately false marketing claim is so abundant it is resting in front of the billboard.
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3 January 2011
My only regular contact with mass-media, the weather “channel” website, never fails to horrify with its truck advertising and teaser links to videos of autos stuck in snow, floods, and the 21st century generally. But seriously: EcoBoost™ with “torture”?
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18 May 2010
You would expect there to be a northbound bicycle route out of the financial district—as this ad’s designer apparently did—but the real Google maps cycling direction service knows better
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11 March 2010
Myth versus reality of New York cycling, motoring
Mercedes’s fantasy of coked-up urban cycling and mellow urban motoring
Amazingly, they admit that their 268 horsepower machines are slower than bicycles for moving people around a city. The new lie is that their vehicles are chambers of urban relaxation, calmly piloted by zen masters who are so over that traffic they’re stuck in. Ha.
If city motorists are chill with always being stuck in traffic, why are they constantly honking their horns? I can literally hear car horns as I type this. Like every morning, car commuters are queuing up for the systematic traffic jams they inflict upon themselves. Unlike the ad’s mellow motorman hero, none of them are listening to smooth jazz and accepting the fact that their fat vehicles can not fit through the streets any faster than they do. Instead they howl and complain through their factory equipped crybaby-megaphones, all gassed-up and throwing a tantrum.
In a few minutes I’ll be coasting past them on a $125 bicycle. I won’t need to jostle with taxis, put myself in danger, or ride on sidewalks because—why the hell would I do that? It’s going to take me 25 minutes like it does every day, I’ll get a little bit of exercise without mussing my hair, and then I’ll be where I need to be.
Or take it from this guy who was riding a bicycle in New York long before luxury foreign suvmakers perceived bicycling Americans as a threat to their business:
Actual New Yorker’s experience riding on bicycles and in motorcars
“It releases endorphins in your system or something—I don’t know, look it up.”
