Episode Description:
In this episode we’ll explore two ads from competing companies in the same year with an exceptionally similar nostalgic theme – targeting the same audience! One is the Jeep ad featuring Bill Murray reprising his role as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day during the 2020 Super Bowl. The other ad is for the Ford Mach-E commercial that aired the Christmas season of 2020 featuring the Griswold family from Christmas Vacation.
Which one did it right? Which one did it better? I’ll share my thoughts and encourage you to let me know what you think!
See the full Super Bowl ad for Jeep here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxe_HLixs1Q
See the full Christmas ad featuring the Ford Mach-E here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmAU8MJoJU4
Action you can take right now:
- Leave a comment – let me know how you connected with each ad – also let me know your demographics (age range). I’m most interested in the opinion of Gen-X and older millennials in which these ads are targeting.
Episode 31 Transcript:
How could two car companies, major corporations do two very similar nostalgic ads and one is amazing and one misses the mark that more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcasts.
Second, Justin Varuzzo here from marketingandservice.com on today’s episode. I want to talk about two special commercials that aired during 2020, and I think this is a learning lesson to talk about what you should and should not do. It’s also my personal analysis and opinion of these two commercials.
Of course I don’t have the books for these companies, and I don’t know what their metrics were, what their KPIs were for, the success of the commercial, or whether it was success or failure.
And so I can’t say maybe these ads were both great and both successful.
Maybe the one I think was great was.
Terrible and the one that I thought was terrible was great, but I did think it was worth walking through them to think a little bit about what goes into nostalgia now.
In the words of Don Draper nostalgia, it’s delicate but powerful.
It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful.
Than memory alone, so that’s all I could think about when I watched these two.
Ads I did see both of them live when they both aired and one I was impressed right up front and the other I didn’t like and after I re watched them many times to really analyze them my feelings didn’t change at all.
So the first ad was aired during the Super Bowl in 2020 on Groundhog Day. Now of course, Groundhog Day.
It was an amazing movie with Bill Murray and they reprised this character and Bill Murray for this role and made it happen.
And I really feel that Jeep.
This was Chrysler.
That’s the commercial was for a Jeep Rubicon.
But I really think that they nailed this one and really hit it out of the park and I want to talk and kind of go scene by.
Scene and explain why I feel this way.
If you’re watching this on YouTube, I’ll put links to the videos.
I’m not going to share the commercials here on YouTube or on the podcast via audio, just because there is copywritten music, and even though it could potentially be fair use, I just don’t want to go down that road.
So this opens up with.
Bill Murray waking up in bed to the sound as I got you babe, which of course was the song that played every single morning when he was stuck in his Groundhog Day loop.
He wakes up to this and he looks around.
He realizes he’s back in that in and he says, oh.
Oh no, it’s happening again is essentially what is being conveyed in this scene, so it takes this and makes you realize this is the present.
He has aged, so it’s not unrealistic to see him looking older than we saw him when he was originally in the movie 20 plus years ago.
So in the next scene he’s now outside.
And he’s in the little town.
And of course we see our.
Other favorite character from this movie.
Ned Ned ryerson.
How could we forget about Ned?
So as Ned is approaching him, he realizes that he is stuck in this same loop again and just wants to get out of there.
And as he’s running away from Ned, he stumbles upon the new Jeep Rubicon.
That is the feature of this.
Add and he says that’s different.
And what he’s saying here is when he was stuck in this loop over and over and over again, everything was exactly the same.
It was dreadful, and that was kind of the whole point of the movie.
But he learned these different things and built these different skills.
But he was always stuck with the same mundane boring day.
Now I think that this is really important to think about given the context of the timing this.
Was done as Super Bowl in 2020, which of course was just before a pandemic. Now part of this is luck. I’d say a big part of this is luck.
But nonetheless, a lot of people feel stuck in a rut and mundane same day day in and day out.
Of course, just a month later we were in a lockdown where most people really did feel like it was Groundhog Day, which kind of makes that commercial, in retrospect a little more powerful than it would have been without a pandemic.
But the point is, is that people feel stuck in a rut.
And the point of this ad is creating this emotional bond with the Jeep Rubicon to say hey.
This thing is different and he of course gets in it after he steals the Groundhog and he goes on all sorts of adventures, day after day.
After day, he’s going on new adventures with his new best friend the Groundhog, and of course, each adventure revolves around driving around in this new Jeep product.
So what’s really cool about this is?
The context of the world we’re in we’re in this world where his day is exactly the same over and over and over again, and the message that’s being conveyed is that if you buy a Jeep.
Every day will be an adventure and every day can be different and I think that’s a really good message to get and add.
I mean, I personally am not a fan of Jeeps.
I’ve never owned one.
I probably never will own one and that certainly didn’t build my personal desire to own one.
But I appreciated the marketing and I appreciated the time.
And thought that went into it to really make that car a piece of the nostalgia of the original movie, because there was no Jeep in the original movie.
He didn’t drive off in a GP, drove off in some old pickup truck, but he he recognized that there was this one thing that was different.
One thing that stood out from everything else in his world and it was this Jeep.
And then from there this Jeep gave him just an immense amount of joy.
Day after day he wakes up happy jumping out of bed and he can’t wait to get back in his Jeep and live another adventure.
And let’s be realistic.
That is really what we want from our favorite.
Car right?
If you have a car that you’ve dreamed of your whole life or a sports car or anything like that when you.
By that, you’re going to be in that car a lot.
A lot of people drive their car every day.
Some people are in their car for hours a day.
Some people spend more time in their car than they spend in their home.
I know I commuted for many, many years and I would put 20 to 30,000 miles a year on a car.
So to me, a car was a very personal space and I did want a car that was reliable.
In a car that was nice and my cars did bring me a new adventure every single day.
I think this was a really cool way to do the ad, and if we want to dig a little deeper into the characters, of course everyone in this commercial was the original cast.
There were really only a few people that they showed Bill Murray playing Phil Connors. You also have Brian Doyle Murray, which Bill Murray’s brother who plays the mayor. So they both reprised their characters as the mayor and.
Phil, of course you have Ned.
We already mentioned that he’s the original character, and that’s really the extent.
And of course the Groundhog and then most of the commercials just watch.
Watching Bill Murray, with the Groundhog having all these wonderful adventures and of course the main subject is the Jeep itself.
So All in all, a pretty cool ad.
It definitely brought me a lot of nostalgia, especially I think with the.
Knowledge of Bill Murray being someone who’s really difficult to get, there’s all sorts of stories that have always circulated around Hollywood in the press about how he doesn’t have a phone and he doesn’t have Internet and he doesn’t let his agent give anyone his phone number.
He doesn’t even have an agent.
And all this crazy stuff, so he only takes a role if he personally gets it. So giving that into consideration to reprising an old movie role and having this workout on Super Bowl Sunday, which happened to be on Groundhog Day, that particular year of 2020, which I think hadn’t happened for I think I read 57 years ago was the last time.
There was a.
A Super Bowl on groundhogs day.
So now of course I know it’s Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day.
I don’t know why I keep calling it.
Groundhogs, Groundhogs, Groundhogs, Day Grant it’s Groundhog Day.
I know this.
It’s weird when you’re just talking to the microphone looking into the camera, but yes, of course Groundhog Day, so it’s the first time in 50 years that we had this in.
Super Bowl Sunday on Groundhog Day.
So was the ad successful?
I don’t know.
Again, as I said in the front of this, not knowing the metrics of what they wanted to get out of the ad, whether it was impressions, awareness of the brand, awareness of that model, it’s really hard to know exactly what they were looking to.
Achieve with the ad, but of course it’s a Super Bowl ad they have a lot of money on the line when they make an ad like this.
So now I want to talk about the second ad that came out in 2020 that was at Christmas time and it was a Christmas vacation reboot for Ford.
Now the first problem I have with.
This ad is.
From what I’ve understand and what I read online.
The Jeep ad was done very quickly in just a few weeks right before Super Bowl because they didn’t think they could get Bill Murray.
And then once they did get him at the last second.
They didn’t think they’d be able to get the rights for the music and all of that stuff squared away in time, but they did and they made a great ad.
Now with Ford, they are essentially making the exact same ad, taking a very popular movie that caters to that generation, which would be your generation X or your older millennials.
That’s really the target.
Market here right?
Because these are kind of sporty SUV’s, the Jeep starts at about 45,000 and goes up to about $75,000 and that Mustang Mach E is in a similar situation where you’re in that 40 to $70,000 price point, so of course they’re trying to target older people who are still young.
Enough to want a fun, cool car, but they have the disposable income to afford a $50,000 vehicle, so it makes a lot of sense that they would use these movies as the nostalgic tools to bring that market out to purchase those cars. So now I want to dive into the forward.
The four dad opens up with the iconic scene from Christmas vacation where Chevy Chase is plugging in the lights and asking everyone to come out to see the big show.
And of course, in this ad he is dressed up as he was.
They’re seemingly in the same house.
It is a great recreation, just like they did in Groundhog Day.
Production value was perfect and you see Chevy Chase about to plug in the lights and he says kids come out.
Come out, look what I did with the lights and of course his family comes out onto the lawn and he asked for the drumroll which felt very uneventful.
Now I don’t know if that was just bad acting or if.
Maybe we are in real time here and he has done this every year for 20 plus years since the movie came out and now his family sick of doing the drumroll but it just didn’t seem very exciting.
Kind of missed the mark from the original in my opinion.
Of course he tries to plug in the lights and they don’t work his family.
Who was there?
Some of them were the original members that were.
In the cast and then there were some others that were not, so you’ve got some.
You’ve got most of the original cast members here outside in the yard.
You’ve got a few.
I believe it’s a father in law that was not in the original movie.
And of course everyone is much older now, which in a way takes you out of that scene.
Because of course in the original movie these kids were very, very young and now they are the millennials and the Gen X cars that are the target market of this car.
But it changes the dynamic of this scene and this this family.
Structure unlike with the Groundhog Day commercial, all of those actors were the same, and even though they were a little bit older, they were all a little bit older, and they all kind of kept the same look, feel and vibe.
In this case, everyone looked a lot older than there were no kids.
The kids weren’t kids anymore, so it just changed things.
A little bit now upon realizing that the lights did.
And work Beverly D’Angelo, the character who plays his wife in the original movie and now is reprised for this role.
It says I’m going to go check on the Turkey and she scoots off to the garage.
Kind of an odd line.
I’m not sure why she didn’t just say I can go check something.
I wasn’t sure if she was really checking on the Turkey in the original movie.
She accidentally figured out how to turn on the lights because she went in the basement to find something that she needed for the kitchen and voila, realized that the light switch was off.
But in this scene, she seems to go directly into the garage.
She turns on some light switch.
It’s not really clear what this switch is, but nothing.
Happens and then lifts the heavy cable off of the Ford Electric Charger to drag it out to the driveway.
And of course, as she plugs that cord into the Ford Maki, like Magic Clark puts the plugs together and boom all of the Christmas lights come on.
But the catch here is that.
Now that everything is well lit, the entire family is ignoring this incredible Christmas spectacular and they’re all drawn to the new Ford Mustang, Mach E.
Except if you haven’t seen this ad and you’re not familiar with the latest Ford.
Cars the Ford Mustang Mach E has nothing to do with the Ford Mustang, so there’s a lot of layers here that frustrates frustrate me about this commercial.
The first thing that caught me the first time I watched it is I would say without a doubt the worst part of an electric car.
And the part that is most concerning for anyone thinking about buying a fully electric car.
Is of course the fact that you have to plug it in so you’re showing the one feature for lack of a better word that everybody hates.
Nobody wants to stretch an extension cord out their driveway across the street to plug their car in.
Now, obviously you’ll do it, and I’m not saying anything bad about electric cars.
I would love to get a Tesla.
It’s one of my fave.
Regards, but the bottom line is that that idea of having to have a charging station and have to.
Lug a heavy cable around if I’m a 70 year old woman that doesn’t seem like an alluring thing to highlight with this car, so to me that was the first thing where I was like.
What are they thinking showing this now I understand.
What they were trying to show is that yes, your electric car can be fed back into your house and actually power your house like a generator, should you lose power.
But in this case there wasn’t a power loss.
There wasn’t a storm, there was really no.
Reason and I don’t understand what links the car to the Christmas lights going on.
She had already flipped the switch on.
The lights were on in the garage so when she flipped that switch the lights should have came on.
Now I don’t know if we were supposed to think that she was powering the house when she plugged in the car or if it was a coincidence she went to check on the Turkey.
And decided she’d plug in the car and right at that moment the lights happened to come on because she had already turned the switch on.
But like the fact that I have to sit here and think about all these things is what makes this ad so insanely crazy to me.
Now we’ll be honest when I look at this ad on YouTube, it does have tons of views.
It’s got thousands of comments saying I love this ad.
Thank God you brought this back.
This is amazing.
So again, this is my opinion from a marketing professionals perspective.
I think of this like a case study.
For marketing and a case study for building a good ad.
As I started this podcast with Don Draper from of course Mad Men, the character in Mad Men, he does a whole episode on creating an ad that creates nostalgia, and that’s really what kept running in the back of my head.
Is that most of the time, nostalgic ads are really difficult to pull off properly.
It’s just.
Easy to try to be nostalgic without really connecting the point of what you’re doing to the nostalgia that you’re trying to create, and that’s what I think really sets apart the G pad from the four.
Ad now again, I’m going to say it because I don’t know what the results were and I could be dead wrong.
I mean that commercial could have been a huge success, but my guess is that while it got tons of views and people love the ad, most people probably will not remember that it was for a.
Mustang Mach E.
My guess is if I was taking a poll today almost a year after that ad was released, most people would remember the ad but not remember what it’s for.
And I see that a lot and I think that happens a lot, especially in Super Bowl.
Lads, it felt like a certainly in the late 90s.
At thepeakofthe.com era, I think marketers really went out of their way to make something that was shocking or catchy.
Or grabbing of your attention, but put all their focus just into that.
So they got it.
They got the attention and they got you to watch the ad and you might have thought it was hysterical.
You might have thought it was the best.
Had you ever saw, but you can’t remember what the ad is?
4 right off the top of my head I can think of an ad that I’ve only seen during the Super Bowl.
Probably the last three or four years for an insurance company.
I don’t remember the name of the insurance company.
I’ve never seen an ad and I’ve never heard of this insurance company, but somehow they’re pulling out the big bucks to spend all this money to do one ad a year.
On the Super Bowl, and I want to say it’s been at least two or three years in a row.
I’ve seen it honest, I just don’t know the name of the company, right?
Right, but this is an example of where I’m wondering, like what what are you thinking like, why you’re gonna spend all this money?
You’d be so much better off taking that money and having consistent ads over and over ago.
GEICO can run an ad during the Super Bowl, and it can be great, but GEICO will also run ads on every channel on every network, on every medium.
On every venue over and over again all year long, and you may not remember the.
But you always remember, and everybody in this country, whether you drive a car or not, whether you watch TV or not, you’re going to know that GEICO can save you up to 15% on car insurance.
It’s a really stupid simple line that has been repeated over and over and over and over again now.
Mustang Mach E.
Now mock E kind of sounds electric.
So I’m thinking, oh cool, this is like is this a new electric Mustang?
It’s probably going to compete with the Tesla Model S.
Something goes here.
This is like a family sedan.
It looks like a Chevy Volt.
It’s a pretty ugly car and it’s just not special.
It doesn’t stand out and I again now you’re doing this nostalgia thing, but the nostalgia?
This just doesn’t really make sense in the context of this movie of Christmas.
What’s happening, why you know?
Is this again?
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be just a recreation and we ignore the original movie, or this is a substitute scene.
Or obviously the kids are all older and you’ve got a father in law in there that wasn’t there before, so we’ll assume the time has passed, but he continues with this tradition because he’s so stupid.
He still hasn’t figured out how to turn on the light switch for the Christmas lights.
It just it really doesn’t make sense to me how Christmas vacation connects specifically to the Maquis and.
In a way you could say the same thing about Jeep and Groundhog Day, because there was certainly nothing that linked those two things together in the original movie.
But they used that as the tool to define and twist this whole scenario.
So here he is.
Back in Groundhog Day, which they make really clear and now he’s in this loop.
But it isn’t the same and he says it the main character of the ad says it.
Oh, this is new.
This is something that was not here the last time I was stuck in this loop, and then of course.
Drives the car round and round and round with the Groundhog and has an amazing time to me.
The Groundhog
That kind of makes sense.
I see how those things connect with the forward Maki plugging in the car to turn the Christmas lights on.
I just don’t see how it makes sense or what the goal was, and the only thing I really got out of this was that, wow, yeah, if you get an electric car you got to put a charger in your garage.
If you don’t park your car in the garage, you’re gonna have to lug this cable out. It’s the last thing that Beverly D’Angelo at 70 years old, probably wants to do is lugging a £40 charger cable through her garage outside.
Because Clark has all of his Christmas decoration boxes filled up in the garage so can’t even drive the car into the.
Garage so this is again it’s my personal opinion.
What do you think?
I mean, what do you think about this?
You’ve got the Jeep ad.
Chances are if you’ve seen Groundhog Day, you have seen Christmas vacation.
They both came out at a similar time.
They’re both targeting the same audience.
They’re both targeting the same income brackets, and they both advertised on.
You know, no well, obviously.
Jeep was a football ad for Groundhog Day that just ran that one time.
I don’t.
Not sure they ran that ad after it, because again, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to run a Groundhog Day ad in April.
But it was I I don’t know what do you think?
Was it affective?
Was it cool?
I mean I did love.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas vacation.
It’s one of my favorite movies.
Groundhog Day is one of my fair.
They’re both in my top ten favorite movies, so I love seeing these characters again.
Don’t get me wrong, this is really fun and cool to see these iconic.
Characters together again because they just played such a big part in childhood.
Growing up watching those movies as a kid.
I loved them and they they still make me laugh today.
But at Christmas vacation ad just.
Made me cringe a lot and I you know, I guess I feel alone with this because the general consensus from the few things I see with YouTube comments and stuff like that and YouTube is usually the most brutal platform for honesty.
But it just seems that they could have done a better job at reviving that role.
Or a better job at somehow integrating that car into the story of the scene or the story of the commercial, or somewhere that would make sense in context of the original movie, which I really think Ford failed to do on that ad.
Of course, the second biggest thing is.
When you copy an ad like that, taking an iconic movie from 20 plus years ago and it’s already happened in February and now less than a year later, another company is doing almost the exact same ad.
Except not as good.
It also made it felt even cheaper.
Would my opinion of the Christmas vacation ad change?
Had Jeep not done the Groundhog Day ad, maybe.
Maybe it would have, maybe I would have appreciated that nostalgia and not felt like it was played out, but honestly, even just within a year I was like hey come on guys like your Ford, you can’t come up with something original.
Your idea for Christmas and and releasing this new car that’s supposed to be the future of your company is to copy what Jeep did 10 months ago.
It just didn’t make a lot of sense.
That’s all I really want to talk about today.
This is a little bit different of an episode than usual, but I I think that.
One of the themes that comes up over and over again on this podcast that we’ve discussed.
If you’ve been listening is that idea of testing ads to make an ad successful, you have to test it over and over and over and over and over and over again, and keep changing variables and keep tweaking it and keep refining it until it’s.
Learn over and over.
Perfect, the problem is if you’re a company like Jeep or Ford and you’re doing a Super Bowl ad, you don’t get that opportunity.
You’re really kind of starting from the ground up because you can’t run the ad a million times, because then everyone will have seen it already and it wouldn’t be special on Super Bowl Sunday.
I see the challenge presented in that, and I appreciate.
What goes into the creative of making a commercial that connects that follows the creative brief set forth by the manufacturer in this case, whether it be Chrysler or Ford.
But I just think that the idea of using.
Late 80s, early 90s movie and recreating the scene for the sake of a commercial on Ford’s part, 10 months after Jeep, that it was just lazy thinking. And again in the absence of the G pad, maybe I would like it a little bit more. I’d certainly be a lot more excited about seeing those characters reunited.
But I just.
I I don’t know, just didn’t do it for me and I have 0 interest in buying a Ford electric car.
I will say the new Ford truck looks pretty cool. There are F-150 electric truck. I just saw some stuff on that. It’s pretty neat to check that out, but the to me the Mustang looks a lot like a like a Chevy Volt which was always a car I thought looked pretty horrendous.
On the road and.
I’m not sure why these companies, with all their resources and all their money they can’t, can’t really do what Tesla has done and just make an electric car that’s sexy and desirable and something that’s fast and and, you know, gets good range and it’s exciting to drive and is exciting to look at and exciting to be in.
And I I feel like.
You know, playing a nostalgic ad for a car that’s just now, it doesn’t hit the mark quite like it should.
It should have been a Mustang.
Make it a Mustang.
If it was an electric Mustang and it was a sports car and you had some some way to connect speed or power or efficiency, but instead the only thing you go for is.
Dragging out a heavy duty 220 Volt electrical cable to plug the car in.
And boy, that just.
It’s mind-blowing to me that people could have sat in a room and said, yeah, that’s a good idea.
Let’s do that. So let me know what you think. Shoot me an email justin@marketingandservice.com.
That’s jestyn at marketingandservice.com of course. Check the website marketingandservice.com if you like this podcast.
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I always want to hear from you what’s going on.
What would you like to hear about in the future?
I know most of these are all about customer service and building those customer relationships.
But I do think advertising is a big component in that customer relationship, because an ad needs to be entertaining.
It needs to be needs to grab the attention of a viewer.
It needs to create.
Awareness also has to be truthful and it has to highlight the benefits from an emotional level from a level.
That’s going to really show how your product or service is going to help someone in their life.
We don’t need a list of specifications, we just want to know how will this thing make our lives better.
That Jeep looks fun.
As hell and I know if I buy one now, this commercial is promising that I’m going to have an adventure every single day.
The Ford Mustang, Mach E If I’m a if I’m an idiot with my Christmas lights then maybe that’s the car should be sitting in my driveway.
Just fell flat for me, so let me know what you think.
Let me know what you think of the ads let me know what you think of this episode.
You kind of like this case study of a of a commercial I I ask because it’s something I’m considering maybe every couple months.
Do a little case study of a national ad campaign.
Or maybe it should just be its own thing, but let me know what you think.
Justin at marketing and service.
Tom, thanks so much for watching.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you’re listening, make sure to check out YouTube for the video from this.
And if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to check out the podcast, because there’s a lot of podcasts that don’t have a video component.
Thanks so much for listening.
I’ll catch you on.
The next one have a great day.