Wednesday, February 07, 2018

1902 Martin Luther King, Jr. the Truck Salesman



“I have a truck.”

Fiat-Ram used parts of a speech by MLK to pitch its trucks during the Stupor Bowl. Shame on you.

You have $5 million to spend on a 30 second spot, but couldn’t spend a few nickels to fix 1.8 million trucks that like to jump spontaneously out of “Park” and start rolling until they had to recall them? Shame on you.

While it may have been nice to hear Dr. King say something beside the four words that everyone on earth now has heard, what were you thinking?  Shame on you.

Equal rights to buy a truck?  We have that already.  Serving the community? We have that already except for some places. But the number is growing as the government shirks its duties to the people.

Earth to Highdive Advertising, the Chicago-based mini agency that created the ad:  Shame on you.

Ram says the King family approved the ad.  The King center says otherwise.

What’s the big deal?  The big deal is you don’t commercialize an important preacher’s words, spoken decades ago in order to push tin off the lot.

Fiat owns Chrysler, maker of Ram trucks, Dodge and Chrysler vehicles.  And it has repeatedly proven it (a) doesn’t know how to do business in America and (2) knows a whole lot less about building cars than it should for a company that has building cars since 1900 and modifying them so they will suitable for use in the third world countries of Europe, Africa and Latin America. And here.

Fiat’s ineptness is legendary. Which is kind of a continuously running shockwave. Look at the rest of Italy: Da Vinci. Vivaldi. Toscanini. Pizza. How can a place of such magnificent marathon achievements allow itself to build cars the punchline for which is  Fiat stands for “Fix It Again, Tony?”

This run of inferiority now evidently includes choosing an ad agency.

Reaction to the ad lit up the Twitter-verse immediately after it ran. Can you imagine all the football crazies watching the game taking time away from their viewing parties to tweet their dissatisfaction?

The tweets were so numerous and so quick that even trump couldn’t get his two cents on the web. Nor could the Associated Press which spends almost as much effort making traffic and clickbait for Twitter than it does on running its wires.

But there are two things this ad did that many others don’t. It got our attention, and we remembered the product.  Ordinarily, this would be good business.  In this case: Shame on you.

SHRAPNEL:
--The US Supreme Court has rejected Pennsylvania Republicans’ plea to stop rebalancing the state’s lopsided congressional districts.  PA’s districts look like a picture wall chart of skin cancer variations, all of which allow republican members of congress to choose their voters and win elections in a state that usually goes blue. Now, if the lawgivers of Harrisburg won’t make the changes, the courts will.

TODAY’S QUOTE:
-“Rejected.” (without comment)  -- US Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito ruling on republicans’ plea to leave gerrymandered PA congressional districts in place.  Alito is the justice who hears “emergency appeals” from Pennsylvania.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
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© WJR 2018


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