Ask The Best And Brightest: Volt Product Placement?
Reuters reports that GM is upping its sponsorship and promotional spending, as it seeks to re-establish its media presence which retracted considerably during and after its bailout and bankruptcy. In addition to boosting sports sponsorships and
co-producing TV shows, like a documentary about a year in the life of a Detroit fire station or a three-part Discovery series on the city,
GM has another strategy in mind as well: product placement for the Chevy Volt. According to the report
GM also is in talks with a reality TV producer about the inclusion of the automaker’s new plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt car in a show under development
but what about movies? After all, if Chrysler (which has plans for only one niche electric vehicle, the Fiat 500 EV) can feature heavily in a movie which was promoted using the line “Electric cars are gay” (see video above), surely GM could get a movie made called “Range Anxiety” in which the Volt rescues the President’s daughter from an evil, but range-limited foreign car by driving farther than 100 miles. Subtle, right? Why don’t I just stick to blogging and let you come up with Volt product placement ideas.
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I suggest a crime show where the Volt runs over an important blind man crossing the street before the opening credits, because he couldn't hear the car approach. The detectives find the car, find out how the pedestrian warning system was disabled, and lead to the eventual arrest of an electronics engineer. The engineer is assassinated by a hidden government agency before he can testify, leading the detectives to discover 2 seasons later that aliens will invade by 2012... If GM won't pay for the product placement, maybe Toyota will!
If my opinion counts for anything, the Volt is overexposed already. How does a car not (yet) available to be bought and driven be called North American Car of the year? I'm surprised it wasn't in StarTrek(2009) to go with the 67 Vette that James T Kirk ran over the cliff. Any science fiction show will do until the car is actually on the road.
How about a remake of The Pretender series? Our hero would drive his Volt around town - solving problems - but the darn thing only gets 93 mpg instead of 230 mpg. And on long trips it only gets 32 mpg. Then he stops at a hotel and asks if they have 'electricity', only to find that there it has no outdoor station sufficient to satisfy the Volt's thirst for power. It would be an unending series of disappointing or near-death experiences for the Voltec drivetrain.
So far, the most blatant and awkward product placement I've seen has been -- predictably -- GM's stilted facetime on the TNT series "Men of a Certain Age." Having a few characters work at a failing Chevy store isn't bad. (One could even argue it's augmented reality.) Having those characters attend the GM display -- and ONLY the GM display -- at an auto show is worse, but still acceptable. Forcing Andre Braugher to call the Volt a "game-changer" during a 20-second promotional "conversation," though, offends me as a human being. (Or at least as a TV watcher who remembers that actor's performance in "Homicide: Life on the Streets," and his character's interactions with an endless series crappy Cavaliers.)