Chevy Truck Ads: Less Howie Long, More Old Spice Guy
Yes, things have changed in the world of trucks. Selling Chevrolet pickups was once a simple task, requiring little more sophistication than the average locker room put-down. In this now-bygone time, spokesmen for Chevy trucks were football players, and advertisements either showed a Silverado busting some dirt, or a Ford owner flitting about like Ryan Seacrest at a Justin Bieber concert. Overt, in-your-face masculinity was the currency of this era in truck advertising… until Dodge went and ruined it all by raising macho truck-ad values to the level of the absurd with its laughable “My Tank Is Full” spots (to be fair though, the paradigm was collapsing under its own weight anyway).
All of a sudden, an earnest repetition of hard-working, masculine values alone just wouldn’t cut it in the world of truck advertising anymore. What truck ads needed was a little bit of irony. Some humor to go with all the horsepower numbers, the celebrations of rugged durability, and yes, even the childish put-downs of the competition. So Chevy watched a lot of “Old Spice Guy” ads, hired some comedians and made it happen… with hilarious results.
Perhaps the most significant reaction that occurred when irony and truck ads first collided: Chevy’s marketers realized that casual, coded homophobia just isn’t funny. Especially when your two new spokesmen spend a lot of time alone in a mountain lodge talking with smoldering passion about their close working relationship (not to mention “torsional stiffness”). Needless to say, this new approach required a new formulation: instead of portraying Ford owners as a bunch of effete pansies, Chevy could simply compare the competition to a baby. You know, because it lacks experience or something. Plus, Ford trucks poop their pants!
Yes, really. You stay classy, truck ads.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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I seem to remember reading that the Old Spice commercials came out of market research that indicated that an awful lot of women bought the product for their men, so they decided to aim the ad at women. Like it or not, the ad is memorable, which is not really something new for Old Spice as I'm sure many of us who are old enough can still whistle the tune that was a fixture of their ads from the '60s.
To be honest I'd probably pause to listen to a commercial where Patrick Warburton read the phone book. Not that it would induce me to buy a pickup truck. But it would get the name recognition out there. All they need to do is dress the baby up a little bit to look like Mike Rowe and those ads would be over the top silly. As is they look a little unfinished.