Development Seed Blog

Yep, the Washington, DC, web strategist mentioned in this month’s Wired magazine is our very own Eric Gundersen. The article, Commercial Break, talks about Chevy’s now notorious advertising campaign for the Tahoe and how it was hijacked.

Back in April Chevy asked regular people to make their own commercial for its new SUV and made it really easy to do. They got a lot of submissions but along with the ones toting the Tahoe’s pulling power were ones lambasting it for its contributions to global warming, the Iraq war, and sexual stereotypes (big car means….). Of course, these videos made it to YouTube. You can watch Eric’s ad here and a bunch of others here. Nightline even ran a piece on it and interviewed Eric. You can watch it here.

So what’s does this have to do with offsite strategy? Everything. Chevy says its campaign – even with the publicity around the activists’ ads and public criticism of its product – was a success, and their profit margins prove this.

While the Development Seed team is skeptical that anything positive came out of the ads for Chevy and has seen the word 'Tahoe' used to refer to all that is bad with an SUV, it needs to look at the numbers before it accuses Chevy of BS and Wired magazine of poor fact checking.  But for now we will quote Wired. 

This is no fluke that tools like YouTube can generate a two page spread story like this. Chevy poured a lot of money into their advertising campaign but a lot of the same tools can be used for a lot less. This election season we advised Public Campaign, an advocacy group that pushes for publicly financed elections, to put their campaign ads on YouTube. This got them a larger audience, hooked them into an active community of people who are into videos, and made it really easy for other people – like political bloggers – to embed the video into their website. Their online ad was viewed 43,945 times, commented on 15 times, and favorited 9 times. The week before elections, it was the top political video on YouTube and the 11th overall.

But the bottom line is that online strategy gets offline results, whether that’s more cars sold or more hybrids put on backorder, more people educated about publicly financed elections, or more Democrats in Congress.