Worst Ad Campaign Ever
World Streets shares this very funny French ad for a car-sharing company.
The translation of their slogan is “It’s almost your car.” In another ad, the same man is eating a messy sandwich in the car and dripping on himself when someone knocks on the door.
How off message can these be? This is an ad campaign that explicitly focuses on the reasons its sort of a drag to share cars. Perhaps it’s a French thing I don’t understand, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this ad were made by Peugeot secretly.
But how do you compete against people who make ads like these three? Watch them here:
In all seriousness, though, transit isn’t just going to outcompete the advertising dollars of even a collapsing auto industry on its own. We need to be both building and selling the car-free lifestyle.
Aaron Brazell
Rhys Thom
Ethan Arpi
robyn liska
helena cobban
Dario Hidalgo
Laura Root
Erica Schlaikjer
clayton lane
noah kazis
Alex Pazuchanics
Neela Pal
Patricio Chile
Nate Baird
Megan McConville
David Daddio
Allison Bishins
Kwame Brown
brian sykora
I fully agree with you. I have been doing “informal research” on this topic for a while and have given some sessions on the topic of “why people love cars” and similar issues in a training course about public awareness and behavior change in transport.
I think there is an additional factor to what you mention above: that the marketing budget for cars is immensely higher than the total budget of any of our organizations, which makes it even harder to get great ads and marketing pieces and direct them to the right audiences.
There is also the issue that cars are always shown in ideal situations (beaches, empty highways, etc) when the truth is that those situations seldom occur! I have also written a little about this in the accompanying text of the training course.
[...] Originally posted by Noah Kazis at TheCityFix DC. [...]