July 24, 2003

Street Car Desire

Electric Moyo .com will not get a proper link in this post. Still haven't seen the "street" component of this Nissan campaign, but street art central the Wooster Collective has photos and comments. And from a designers perspective What Do I Know has a good write up and discussion.

The jist, Nissan deliberately "vandalizes" its own ads in order to look "cool". The reality, if you get Ali G to write you copy you are going to look retarded. And more importantly if you want to make a car look "cool", make the actual car look good. Pretty simple. A cheap ad campaign is never going to make a shitty car hot.

The funniest shit is that they are the second car company this to try and borrow off graf culture. First attempt was so bad I can't remember what car they were trying to pimp, needless to say it was fucking ugly as sin. And had a "new" brand to hide its corporate roots. Don't think that campaign is going far. At least they had more subtlety, an art opening with free drinks and bad art from young artists. Good young artists too, there must have been something about the sell out that kept them from producing quality.

Truthfully I'd like to see this done right. I have no problems with big car company money funding young artists. But do it in a way that doesn't embarrass us ok? It might even sell a car or two.

Posted by Abe at July 24, 2003 11:21 AM

Comments

There have been dozens, but the breakout moment for me was the "spraypainted" Dodge Neon ads of ~1993. (The original copy read "Hi" and was "modified" to read "HiP," if I remember correctly. It wasn't.)

FUCK YOU