Ganging up on General Motors

General Motors has launched what is probably an ill-advised marketing website. At chevyapprentice.com/ they have a contest in which you can make a commercial for the 2007 Chevy Tahoe. The best commercial wins something.

However, what's happening is a bunch of people making activist type commercials.

Rather than something extolling the SUV, they're instead talking about global warming, destroyed environment and, in one case, a memorial from one brother to another who was sent to Iraq to fight for oil.

The site is very easy to use, and creating an advertisement is very simple. They offer some typical video clips of the type you see in car commercials, and they offer some sound tracks. You simply drag the clips into the order you want, and enter text to overlay on the clips.

Their web site is an example of a new kind of marketing activity. The Internet is allowing for greater ease in building "community" of a sort, where web sites serve as a meeting place for people to share with one another. In this case they are hoping for people to go COOL, make commercials, and share them with their friends. This should build a word-of-mouth viral spread of awareness over the web site. The gain they'll have is from their brand and logo being put in front of more eyeballs.

We don't know how many of the people using this site to make activist commercials versus SUV-loving commercials.

Here's some pointers collecting the advertisements people have made.

GM SUV spoofed by environmentalists

Video: Oops! Chevy gets trashed in commercial contest

One of the commercials I made

TreeHugger: Make Your Own SUV Ad

MOBJECTIVIST: Last gasp of a dying organization

Sustainablog: 'Chevy Apprentice' Becomes Activism Tool

Eco Blogger Call to Action: Make your own Chevy Advert

Network-Centric Advocacy: You MUST try This: Culture Jam Chevy and Global Warming: Sloganator II

Chevy Ads : Network Culture Jamming the Apprentice (whack at Trump, GM and SUVs)

Ganging up on General Motors

General Motors has launched what is probably an ill-advised marketing website. At chevyapprentice.com/ they have a contest in which you can make a commercial for the 2007 Chevy Tahoe. The best commercial wins something.

However, what's happening is a bunch of people making activist type commercials.

Rather than something extolling the SUV, they're instead talking about global warming, destroyed environment and, in one case, a memorial from one brother to another who was sent to Iraq to fight for oil.

The site is very easy to use, and creating an advertisement is very simple. They offer some typical video clips of the type you see in car commercials, and they offer some sound tracks. You simply drag the clips into the order you want, and enter text to overlay on the clips.

Their web site is an example of a new kind of marketing activity. The Internet is allowing for greater ease in building "community" of a sort, where web sites serve as a meeting place for people to share with one another. In this case they are hoping for people to go COOL, make commercials, and share them with their friends. This should build a word-of-mouth viral spread of awareness over the web site. The gain they'll have is from their brand and logo being put in front of more eyeballs.

We don't know how many of the people using this site to make activist commercials versus SUV-loving commercials.

Here's some pointers collecting the advertisements people have made.

GM SUV spoofed by environmentalists

Video: Oops! Chevy gets trashed in commercial contest

One of the commercials I made

TreeHugger: Make Your Own SUV Ad

MOBJECTIVIST: Last gasp of a dying organization

Sustainablog: 'Chevy Apprentice' Becomes Activism Tool

Eco Blogger Call to Action: Make your own Chevy Advert

Network-Centric Advocacy: You MUST try This: Culture Jam Chevy and Global Warming: Sloganator II

Chevy Ads : Network Culture Jamming the Apprentice (whack at Trump, GM and SUVs)

Re: The price of gasoline could get ugly in 2006

The "Hybrid Cars Blog" suggests that in 2006, the price of gasoline could get ugly. That is, the high gas prices seen in the U.S. last year could be as bad, or worse. See: The price of gasoline could get ugly in 2006

The story seems to be that the cause for last years oil price surge can be found in the gap between China having increasing oil use and weather related outages in oil delivery. This year China's surging oil demand is still there, plus we have several possible outages in oil delivery such as "rebels" in Nigeria attacking oil platforms, and the situation in Iran from which there could be several ways oil delivery could be blocked.

While that story is very true, it is also an example of short term thinking.

In the long term picture the price for oil can only go up. In the short term there will be fluctuations, but long term is a different story. Why? It's because the demand continues to go up in an unabated curve, and the Peak Oil scenario is looming out there.

The Peak Oil scenario is a model developed by oil company scientists that describes production capacity over time. The model shows that the world oil production capability will peak. Already discoveries of new oil fields has dried up with discoveries not at all meeting the growth in demand for oil.

UPDATE in December 2006 ... the price for oil and gasoline did get very high up until September. Then it curiously dropped just before the election, and then has curiously risen a little since the election. Makes one wonder if some kind of price manipulation was being tried by the oil industry to prop up the Republicans? If so, it didn't work.

GetUsedParts.com

This looks like a very useful sort of service. Say your car is broken, and maybe it's not exactly a popular car, and the part that's broken is hard to find. How do you go about finding the part you need? One possibility is to call all the junk yards in the area, but that takes a lot of time.

So, consider this welcome message:

Welcome to Get Used Parts, the easy way to find used auto parts online. Designed to help people with any level of car experience find used auto parts and car parts, Get Used Parts puts you in touch with thousands of junk yards coast to coast for a free, easy online solution. Now you can find used auto parts without scraping through salvage yards. Whether you are a full-time mechanic or a person who thinks cars just get people from point A to point B, locating car parts online guarantees great automotive parts while keeping your hands clean.

That's what they do, is serve as a middleman between you and thousands of junk yards. Instead of calling the junk yards yourself, you enter your request into the web site and it sends queries to the junk yards for you.

Since my car is missing its radio (actually, I took the radio out) I just tested the site. While the site did not work with Safari, it works fine with Firefox (Mac). It's very easy to use the site to describe the part you need. The site knows all the makes and models of cars, and the kind of parts that goes into each one. This is very reassuring in that it will help you describe the part correctly even if you don't know all the technically correct words.

I discovered this site here: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000907.php