'Mysterious' Flying Cars Promote GM's 100,000 Warranty

gm_flying_cars.jpg

Oh how we love a fun viral campaign. Especially when it comes from the biggest of big boys, GM. They've had three amateur videos floating around since the beginning of the month that, while capturing seemingly innocent events, reveal flying cars in the background. Will Video For Food has a good analysis of the campaign and points out an accompanying Anglefire (that company is still around?) website called Future Technology Today which delves deeper into the videos. The whole thing became very obvious once GM began running ads promoting its 100,000 warranty on Jalopnik showing flying cars in the banners.

While we in the industry love to analyze this stuff to death, we wonder how effective virals like this are once it becomes obvious it's a GM commercial. At first glance, one might not notice all the cars in the videos are GM. But anyone with a web connection and Google can quickly find all the answers they want about these videos. We're not complaining. We're just wondering.

Written by Steve Hall    Comments (8)     File: Video, Viral     Sep-18-06  
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Comments

Steve if you aregoing to use the word "viral" with this GM effort use a four point type face.
That's about how much it's worth.

Posted by: ROY on September 18, 2006 12:28 PM

Heh, anglefire.com is actually a misspelling of, what I assume you meant, angelfire.com. Made that mistake sometime ago. Yes, angelfire still hosts my old site while anglefire is an adult personals site.

As far as the campaign goes, I think it's actually a really good idea. Too bad GM thinks they'll get more attention by doing it a few times and putting it on the internet and doing the whole "viral" thing than doing it regularly in the real outside world (where people drive cars). Fly that baby over rush hour traffic in New York or Boston and I bet it will get more views!

Posted by: StephL on September 18, 2006 01:07 PM

Hate to be a negative sport on this, but I cannot STAND car commercials that advertise their cars doing something they don't actually do...what's the point?

You see them flying and going underwater in ads; and yet, in real life, if you drive through a puddle your cheap neoprene fan blades bend backwards and tear up your radiator costing you a nice $500 to repair. And no technology in the world has been engineered to fly, squeeze, evaporate or do anything else to ease you out of a traffic jam.

So do they really deserve to sell their cars based on technology they have failed to deliver? They really need to stop taking credit for things the product can't really do; it's like a tragic admittance that there's nothing good/new/interesting about this car so the only cool thing they can possibly advertise is something entirely and wholly irrelevant to the true capability of this product. Sad.

Posted by: Melissa on September 18, 2006 03:44 PM

Kind of a stupid idea if you ask me. If them GM contraptions could fly they would leak oil real bad all over the place. Come to think of it, they drop parts all over the place now.

Posted by: Old Redneck on September 18, 2006 05:48 PM

Some interesting criticism here... I think we're all reaching for the moon, but this one had a longer ladder than most.

What I'm most interested in is the Agency World's point of view on how much ideal timing would have lapsed between the launch of the videos and the acknowledgement that GM is behind it. Can you still do a teaser campaign without looking like you're funding the Al Gore video or latest version of LonelyGirl15?

I'm not asking rhetorically. I'm really interested in some POVs.

-Nalts, willvideoforfood

Posted by: nalts on September 18, 2006 08:06 PM

Some interesting criticism here... I think we're all reaching for the moon, but this one had a longer ladder than most.

What I'm most interested in is the Agency World's point of view on how much ideal timing would have lapsed between the launch of the videos and the acknowledgement that GM is behind it. Can you still do a teaser campaign without looking like you're funding the Al Gore video or latest version of LonelyGirl15?

I'm not asking rhetorically. I'm really interested in some POVs.

-Nalts, willvideoforfood

Posted by: nalts on September 18, 2006 08:06 PM

Is there an echo in here?

Posted by: nalts on September 18, 2006 08:08 PM

Does anyone know the name of the tune that's in the flying car ad?

Posted by: korina57 on October 8, 2006 08:59 PM

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