"Butterflies? Nice. Oh look, a blue one!" <cringe>
Sorry, while I'm not an expert and am pretty much on the periphery of the
media, I have some notions of what makes an ad work, and there isn't much of
it in this one.
In my book, this ad is a facepalm. I rather hope no one sees it, because I
fear it will do more harm than good to the image of EVs. While it doesn't
have the creepy quality of the infamous EV1 toaster ad, it's one of the most
amateurish, blandest, longest-winded ads I've ever seen, for any product.
This seems more like an internal Ford training video presentation than
something intended for public viewing. The target audience isn't at all
clear, unless it's Florida retirees, thanks to the presence of an older
spokesperson. I know he means well, but outside of the the hobbyist EV
community, who knows who Ed Begley Jr is?
The ad has no particular emotional message. There's nothing to grab the
viewer's heart or gut. Nor does it do much to grab the viewer's head. The
rational arguments are pretty weak, and lost among a blizzard of irrelevant
verbiage. Why on earth would you start off an EV ad by talking about how
great the company's ICEs are? Why bring up Ford's hybrids, which don't
sell?
Worse, it insults EV buyers. Why, for goodness sake, would they marginalize
and trivialize us as "Mr. Socks with the Birkenstocks" and "those [few] who
are ready to charge into the electric world"?
The production quality is excruciating. It's embrassingly amateurish, about
what you'd expect from a college TV production project. It's huge and
clunky. The music drones on and on with the endless jabber, formulaic and
repetitive. Somewhere inside this clunky 3 minutes and 20 seconds might be
a passable 30 second spot, but good luck finding it.
Visually, it's static. What few visual effects they use are hackneyed and
stilted.
And BUTTERFLIES? Seriously?
This ad doesn't make me think of Ford as committed to EVs. Quite to the
contrary. I already knew that their EVs would be quick and dirty
conversions, just like their gas-only hybrids that haven't sold. This $1.98
ad just reinforces that low-budget image.
Leaf may have its limitations, but when it comes to actually selling it to
real world customers, the Nissan folks are doing a lot of things right.
They started by making the leaf a car that's exclusively an EV, like the
Prius was exclusively gas hybrid. (Yes, I know they're using an existing
platform, but the Leaf is visually unique.) Unlike Ford's (and Honda's)
proposed EVs, there is no version of the Leaf that you can put gasoline
into, and that's a good thing. The Leaf has an instant visual EV and
"green" identity and image.
And Nissan have produced ads for it that build on this image by speaking to
the heart as much as (or more than) the head. They're high voltage, well
targeted ads with the budget that comes from a fully committed company.
I'm actually starting to believe that Nissan is in EVs for the long run.
Ford? Serious? Not on the evidence presented here. Nissan's polar bear
knocks this out of the water, so to speak.
David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA
EVDL Administrator
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