GM Scares Itself With Gay-Oriented Camaro Marketing
The marketing mavens at GM commissioned a Youtube video of two “bumblebee boys” washing a Camaro for Chevrolet’s “Gay Days At The Movies” promotion. The bankrupt automaker pulled the ad after a single day for being “tasteless.” (As the Chinese market ad in the post below proves, using sex to sell fast cars is never OK.) Only yesterday, GM’s Dave Barthmuss told USA Today that the video might surprise some “because you don’t see it in the mainstream.” But the ad would “make sense for this particular audience.” Today, Barthmuss tells USA Today that “the video was not appropriate and not in good taste.” The only problem was that (apparently) nobody at GM had actually seen the video. The spot has been yanked from YouTube; it’s internet MIA. So why spend (taxpayer) money on ads like this if you aren’t even going to use them? And what about the video makes it any more tasteless than, say, a Camaro in Harvest Gold or It’s A Girl Pink?
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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Guys...please, my post was NOT meant to be taken that seriously. Whew, talk about insecurity!
We live in a sad, sad world when all traces of this video seem to have "evaporated" from the Internet, and yet we have plenty of opportunities to see photos of Nikki Catsouras' mangled body following the accident in her Dad's Porsche.
Good for GM for trying. They need to get the word out that its not the same GM as before, and that the products that they offer, the Camaro in particular, are much more sophisticated than the products of the past. They need to go after different markets, in a more targeted way. I think going after the gay is a great idea. The Camaro certainly is not a stereotypical 'gay' car, and there will definately be gay folks that are looking to stand out from all the other gay folks in typically gay cars - which on the Wet Coast seem to be MINI, BMW 3 series, Acuras - anything not domestic. As a gay car guy, I think its great that they are marketing to us. Its always an interesting study to see what their marketing departments think us gays will respond to. And its nice to see hunky men washing cars rather than scantly clad women doing the same - 'spot the fake breasts' gets really boring, really fast.