╠ SAAB - Release Me ╣

I must admit I was incredibly surprised to see votes in my poll in the first day. I was honestly expecting to have none for the entire week, so you can probably imagine my surprise to get 7. With 4 of those 7 votes the SAAB - Release Me ad was the winner...You people never want the simple ones explained do you :P

Also just to point out I worked on a logo this week and the G you can see in the header above is just that. Also the G to the side is an edit on that to see if attaching the logo of the groups I critique adds anything. Any opinion on either is well encouraged. Also to those of you wondering what the 'advertising space' means. The basic point is that in this world it's sort of interesting to see that just to what limits advertising can reach. You think of it, and there's advertising on it. My incorporation of this into my logo is saying in my semi artsy wankery way is that even Gruen Transfers personal logo is not exempt from advertising other brands. The point that the core logo and recognizable feature of something can itself include advertising for something else. I hope I explained it well, if you're still confused just hit me up with a comment. Anyway onto Release Me.



Overall I believe this ad is sort of good, however it just went a bit askew. I believe the build up is good. It really gets the point of nature being contained and wanting to be released. It has simply one point it wants to put out and it points it out again and again to make sure it is understood without being intrusive. Personally I felt some of the images made me almost feel sad for it. Paritcularly the whale and the dog slow motion bits I found to be effective. The lyrics were also very powerful in hitting this point home. Now it may just be the site I took the lyrics from but these lines don't actually line up in the song, they are split up. So it was these lines being specifically chosen as compared to just choosing a part of the song. Here is the lyrics in case you didn't understand them all.

I am a rolling wave without the motion
A glass of water longing for the ocean
I am the fire burning desperately but you're controlling me
Release me
Release me

The fire burning line actually breaks in when the dog is trying to break free and I believe that is the power moment of the ad. I believe that if you don't get the message here you may not be paying as much attention when viewing the ad, which when you think about how people view ads could be a vast majority, thus they later bring in the line across the screen that points it out especially that the power of nature wishes to be free. I really think up to this point the ad has worked really really well. Up to here I am really impressed...then the car appears.

I have to admit linking the car to this theme of releasing nature is a hard one, and I personally cannot think of how to do it better, however perhaps it needs to be said that perhaps it wasn't the time for this sort of campaign. I believe that it is too early into the environmentally friendly car campaigns. When I link cars to the environment I think it's negative...and I think many others would do the same. Thus when you talk about releasing the environment, suddenly releasing something likely to destroy the environment doesn't really work. Sure it may destroy it less but at the moment cars in any form are still a negative on the carbon emission scale.

I believe this sort of campaign would better be saved for when environmentally efficient cars become a bigger market. At the moment I don't personally know many people who would be in SAAB's target market, but I imagine the people who have the money to throw at something as swish as a SAAB car would be the type of person who sacrifices everything else to propel themselves forward and because of this if they offer a model like this and then a normal car with perhaps a fancy gps attached then the GPS will probably win. Odds are that this SAAB probably has a GPS already but the basic point is that I believe most people in the target market would consider the environmentally friendlier features to simply be inline with the sort of gimicky yet useful features and not exactly a top tier one at that.

Personally now whenever I look at the ad and I just see the car coming out to the line 'release me' I just think in my head 'I can't believe you've done this'. It really did have potential, and it is a really good ad, but just the environmentally friendly transition to car is too before its time. I believe it would be misinterpreted as egotistical simply because of how it's trying to compare the car to nature itself.

One other thing that caught my interest is the bhp line. I asked around and it turns out very few people even know what this means. This is the one line they're using to promote the cars features and they chose to say something that cannot be understood by everyone. What I interpreted from researching is that it stands for is actually Brake Horse Power and it stands for the power provided to the steering wheel if you ignore the non-necessary elements such as power steering. So overall the message they're saying is it's a powerful enviro friendly car. It's gotten across but just not as effective as possible. Another ad that says the same thing is the ad with one guy with a slurpee that goes 'We can't all drive fast cars'. Personally I don't remember the car in particular in that ad, however if I were in the market I think that would be more effective since it got the message across more clearly and while incorparting a good laugh.

Anyway that's probably all I have to say about this ad at the moment. But I hope you gained something from it. I shall be starting the new poll for this week shortly. The competing ads are Cadbury's Trucks, Honda's CRV, The Big Ad and Bonds Hi and Lo.