GM Takes The Lead
Co-worker VeloBusDriver turned me on to yet another boner popped by our nation's nemesis General Motors: GM ads that mock bicyclists and pedestrians.
Embiggenate the shame of cycling.
It gets worse. As if this ad (which ran in UCLA's student paper) weren't enough, GM tried to apologize in a very, very ham-fisted and obviously untruthful way. Mark Degnan, Director of Local Advertising and Marketing, actually wrote, "It was not our intent to make light of a healthy lifestyle and cycling." I ask you, people, if that ad doesn't "make light of a healthy lifestyle and cycling," what exactly does it do?
A little digging in the comments revealed that, at least a day after Mark published his official "apology," GM was still running banner ads which I think are even worse. This little number to the left was, according to a commenter, an intro to a feature that allowed people to toggle between different GM pedestrian-splashers currently on the market . . . at the GM College Discount web site. Showing cyclists to be shamefully un-date-able is one tactic; showing pedestrians to be worthy targets of driver derision borders on goading hate speech.
I got the title for this entry after I described it to The Wife. She has admittedly far more experience dealing with corporate culture. She notes that this kind of "taking the lead" in "making a difference" talk is pretty common in meetings everywhere. I countered that all of us differ on what steps can be considered forward leading and which just carry the walker backward. Why? Each of us has in our heads different definitions of utopia and hell. Your utopia might very well be my idea of hell.
People who gather together every day and interact with each other every day form a society of their own. They can reinforce each other in ways that might very well seem alien to those outside the culture, even contrary to devices designed to catch errors and correct them. General Motors, formed of people, is no exception. Are we in agreeance?
When someone in a board meeting suggests an ad campaign mocking cyclists because focus groups show that cycle riders (especially in LA, where the paper ad ran) would rather drive, someone else in that group (probably in Detroit, one of the least pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities in our nation) thought that was a fine idea and green-lighted the campaign. After all, whatever sells more cars the better, no matter how despicable the idea might seem to non-auto industry people.
Why, I bet these ads were run by some of the same people who thought those kooks over at the electric car division were tilting at windmills with their wacky wiz-bang battery cars. Those EV-1s, some of the most advanced modern electric cars every produced commercially, got exactly what GM corporate culture thought should come to them.
Crushed, just like the naive hope of every pedestrian and cyclist that General Motors will ever, ever change.
Embiggenate the shame of cycling.
It gets worse. As if this ad (which ran in UCLA's student paper) weren't enough, GM tried to apologize in a very, very ham-fisted and obviously untruthful way. Mark Degnan, Director of Local Advertising and Marketing, actually wrote, "It was not our intent to make light of a healthy lifestyle and cycling." I ask you, people, if that ad doesn't "make light of a healthy lifestyle and cycling," what exactly does it do?
A little digging in the comments revealed that, at least a day after Mark published his official "apology," GM was still running banner ads which I think are even worse. This little number to the left was, according to a commenter, an intro to a feature that allowed people to toggle between different GM pedestrian-splashers currently on the market . . . at the GM College Discount web site. Showing cyclists to be shamefully un-date-able is one tactic; showing pedestrians to be worthy targets of driver derision borders on goading hate speech.
I got the title for this entry after I described it to The Wife. She has admittedly far more experience dealing with corporate culture. She notes that this kind of "taking the lead" in "making a difference" talk is pretty common in meetings everywhere. I countered that all of us differ on what steps can be considered forward leading and which just carry the walker backward. Why? Each of us has in our heads different definitions of utopia and hell. Your utopia might very well be my idea of hell.
People who gather together every day and interact with each other every day form a society of their own. They can reinforce each other in ways that might very well seem alien to those outside the culture, even contrary to devices designed to catch errors and correct them. General Motors, formed of people, is no exception. Are we in agreeance?
When someone in a board meeting suggests an ad campaign mocking cyclists because focus groups show that cycle riders (especially in LA, where the paper ad ran) would rather drive, someone else in that group (probably in Detroit, one of the least pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities in our nation) thought that was a fine idea and green-lighted the campaign. After all, whatever sells more cars the better, no matter how despicable the idea might seem to non-auto industry people.
Why, I bet these ads were run by some of the same people who thought those kooks over at the electric car division were tilting at windmills with their wacky wiz-bang battery cars. Those EV-1s, some of the most advanced modern electric cars every produced commercially, got exactly what GM corporate culture thought should come to them.
Crushed, just like the naive hope of every pedestrian and cyclist that General Motors will ever, ever change.