Ad Spot: Buick

Kentucky has caught up and there is a close if low scoring NCAA National Championship game. As one of the premier March Madness sponsors Buick gets to put its name on the official watch anywhere app and buy lots of commercials in the regular broadcast. Unfortunately, Buick is spending all that money on a brand commercial that isn't as good as it should be considering the cash outlay. For unexplained reasons half the people have absolutely zero idea that they are staring directly at a Buick right in front of them. Sure, Buick's lineup is recently refreshed but all of the models have been out for at least a few years with the same general shape and a few of them sell in significant numbers to be pretty common cars on the road. Of course everyone involved is highly impressed by the cars that they see and are shocked to learn that they are Buicks. Certainly the ad aims to get more people to consider a Buick for their next purchase and will get some people to do so but I struggle to see the audience getting really excited about a product that acknowledges its lack of popularity and brand heat. The ad works well enough as a standard primetime TV ad but when you are spending nearly Superbowl type money you would expect something more memorable so people can you know remember your brand.

Commercial Review: Corvette's Just To Be Fair

I gave high ratings to the last Corvette commercial that I saw, but this new one has a serious stretching the truth problem. First let's start with the positives, the commercial features the Corvette which was a competitive product for Chevy even when the rest of its car division was not. Second it features Corvette's involvement in ALMS racing which has some of the most exciting production based racing in the world. However, the main argument of the commercial is that Corvette had to "dial back" the ZR1's power output to race in ALMS. While it is true that the production Corvette ZR1 makes more power than the GT racing version there is also a little fact that gets in the way, rules. The governing body that runs the 24 Hours of Le Mans and creates ALMS rules does an excellent job of equalizing different types of engines to create competitive racing. The rules specify that a supercharged engine can at most have a displacement of 4 liters. Thus the GT Corvette cannot use a "dialed back" version of the ZR1 engine and in fact it uses a modified Z06 engine (take a look at a truthful Corvette Racing video about the GT engine below) The upcoming C7 Corvette is said to use the next generation of the legendary smallblock with 5.5 liters of displacement as its base engine with a power output of around 430-450 horsepower. Mathematically, Corvette would likely need to "add power to go racing" instead of "dialing it back by about 168 horsepower". The discrepancy between the claim in the commercial and reality is particularly shameful because the ZR1 does perfectly fine on its own without the need to stretch the truth as the production ZR1 is quicker around a track than the production versions of BMWs, Porsches and Ferraris that the GT Corvette competes against on the track.