On Mellencamp's Chevy ad, DellaFemina says: "all you get is a lousy Chevy truck”

“The message seems to be, ‘If you don’t buy our truck, we will go bankrupt,’ ” said Al Ries of Ries & Ries, a brand consultancy. “The kind of people who buy trucks are not going to buy them because a company is in trouble. People like to buy from winners.”

Jerry Della Femina, who runs an ad agency in New York, says he believes the spot is something of a new low.

“You see all these moving images and at the end of it, all you get is a lousy Chevy truck,” he said. Mr. Della Femina called the ad “manipulative” and said it suggested that G.M. was “somehow coming up from the depths.”

• And now we have Mr. Mellencamp, who’s done some rebranding of his own, having dropped the “Cougar” from his name back when his image needed a folksy turn. His political values seem equally elastic. He and his spouse once wrote a jeremiad against the Bush administration that said, in part: “It is time to take back our country. Take it back from political agendas, corporate greed and overall manipulation.”

That was in 2003. Now he’s sitting on the fender of a Chevy truck, strumming a guitar and singing, “Well, I can stand beside ideals I think are right, and I can stand beside the idea to stand and fight.” He can also stand beside a nice shiny truck, if the fee is right.

When it comes to selling bars, trucks or even politicians, you can wave the flag or you can drape one over a coffin. You can’t do both."

From NY Times article by David Carr, 10/30/06 It did seem a little confusing.

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