Saturday, August 30, 2008

What a surprise! Another awful Toyota commercial!

I know Toyota is a Japanese car company, but despite the fact that their American commercials are made in the good ol' U.S. of A., there's still something lost in translation with so many of their idiotic ads.

It's a special brand of hate, really. I don't like many car commercials to begin with. At all. They're rarely original, often jam-packed with numbers and percentages and stock footage of vehicles driving in scenic locales. But I've always spewed the most venom at ads for Toyota, which ironically makes really nice cars.

There was the 2007 Camry ad that makes men look spineless and women look insane. And the Tacoma ad that unintentionally praises a competing truck.

And then there's this newer one that I should like because it offers a car with good fuel economy, but loses all credibility at just the 3-second mark with the dopey deejay who asks his supposed listeners about gas prices by asking if they "love 'em (or) hate 'em":



Clearly that radio station has call letters of WTF on the east coast or KRZY on the west. Unless the station is exclusively pumping the show into the ears of ExxonMobil employees on an oil rig, I highly doubt anyone's calling in to celebrate gas prices that make my face melt.

So what's more likely/offensive? That Toyota just got lazy with writing the copy for the deejay? Or that some ad wizard suggested that "love 'em" be added to the line so that the 0.0000000000001 percent of us who actually profit off high oil prices will consider buying a Toyota?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Toyota may be a Japanese company, BUT Toyota Motor Sales, USA (TMS)is American company based in Torrance, California. All media buys and campaign development are conducted by TMS USA and not by Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) based in Japan. TMS's marketing group are headed up by Americans not Japanese.

Chris Serico said...

If you reread my first paragraph carefully, I mention that the ads are produced in the US.