| Car Commericials Rock On | The Toronto Star Wheels - 04/27/02 | |
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Is there a song in your head that keeps playing over, and over, and over again? Well, with so many car commercials featuring music these days, you can probably blame your Stuck Tune Syndrome on a car ad.
From Bob Seger’s overworked “Like a Rock” (Chevrolet) to the Beatles “Help”(Lincoln-Mercury), it seems everybody’s lending their songs to automotive advertising. Despite fan accusations of musicians selling out, more and more bands are cashing in on the car manufacturers’ desire to use the power of music to attract buyers. It’s a popular advertising tactic precisely because the right music can make a desensitized television viewer sit up and take notice. (“Zoom, zoom, zoom.”) The current Mitsubishi commercial featuring the BareNaked Ladies song “One Week”, with it’s rapid-fire lyrics and head-bopping rhythm, is certainly hard to ignore. Where dialogue often fails, music succeeds, grabbing the consumer’s attention for those few precious seconds. Though sometimes it’s only long enough to wonder “Hey, who sings that?” Some songs: “Who Let the Dogs Out?” (Honda) or “I’m Too Sexy” (Toyota) work because they’re instantly recognizable by all age groups. Such popularity however frequently leads to over-exposure, which in turn can rapidly deteriorate into being just plain annoying. Often commercials, and therefore the songs in them, are directed towards a very specific target audience. Currently ads aimed at the elusive youth market seem to be in vogue, hence Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” for Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan’s use of the Chemical Brothers and Smashmouth. Music also has the nostalgia factor working for it. Songs have the power to stir up powerful memories and emotions, which advertisers attempt to capitalize on. The idea here is to link that the good feeling you get from the music to the product in the ad. To do this car commercials sometimes reach back for a song that’s an oldie but a goodie. The Ford Escape’s spot: Lunar Landing, features “Fly Me To The Moon”, a song popularized in the 60s by Frank Sinatra. A catchy PT Cruiser ad uses the familiar L-O-V-E (“L is for the way you look at me. O is for..), originally crooned by Nat King Cole, but sung this time by Kathy Fisher. Then there’s the Led Zeppelin tune “Rock and Roll”. Hard to believe, but the song does come from an album that’s over thirty years old. Used in Cadillac’s intriguing new CTS commercials, it marks the first time Led Zeppelin has sold one of its songs for use in an ad campaign. Here the song’s purpose is to draw the attention of younger consumers (well, younger relative to the stereotypical Cadillac buyer), sparking interest and hopefully prompting them to look at the Cadillac line in a new light. With a similar change of image in mind, last year Dodge signed up the rock band Aerosmith. In the mutually beneficial deal, Dodge sponsored Aerosmith’s “Just Push Play” tour, and the band supplied the music for the car manufacturer’s “Grab Life by the Horns” ad campaign. But not all the songs used in car ads are as immediately recognizable as The Who (Nissan) or Sting (Jaguar), or even Wayne Newton’s Danke Schoen (Mercedes-Benz). Some are relative unknowns, prior to becoming part of a car commercial, but then end up being catapulted up the music charts, as was the case with the Wiseguys song “Start the Commotion” featured in a Mitsubishi ad. A Volkswagen commercial brought posthumous success to singer Nick Drake when his song Pink Moon was featured in a Cabrio convertible ad. Such exposure, to a wider, more diverse audience, is precisely why some bands allow their music to be commercialized. The success of these music driven commercials has even led to the production of a few compilation albums. Last year saw the release of “As Seen on TV: Songs From Commercials”, a twenty song album which features numerous songs popularized by car ads. As well Volkswagen offers, through its website, a CD that contains exactly what its title suggests: “Street Mix - Music from VW Commercials Volume1”. Music apparently chosen because it possesses the “soul to convey the essence of Volkswagen”. However not all such symbiotic relationships function so smoothly. Recently British band Chumbawamba agreed to sell its song “Pass It On” to General Motors for use in an ad campaign. But then the band announced it would be donating the $100,000 licensing fee to two anti-corporate activist groups: IndyMedia and CorpWatch.. CorpWatch in turn declared it would use its portion of the band’s pay cheque for corporate accountability work, including the documentation of General Motors Corporation’s social and environmental impact. In other words, they’d be using the car company’s own money against itself. |