February 20th, 2007

I saw the above ad at Adver­Box, because I’m a dork and I read web­sites about ads and mar­ket­ing. Anywho, I found this par­tic­u­lar ad to be fairly witty. Our polit­i­cal lead­ers always talk about break­ing depen­dence on for­eign oil, and it’s fairly obvi­ous it won’t happen any time soon. What is never talked about, how­ever, is the effect this will ulti­mately have on for­eign economies if our nation and others really work towards alter­na­tive energy sources.

That’s why I love this ad. It’s very ‘fresh’ – a humor­ous twist on the global warming/energy crisis/environmentalism topic. The tagline is “unfortunate for some”.

It cer­tainly goes a long way towards making the Prius a polit­i­cal (and envi­ron­men­tal) state­ment rather than just a car. And frankly, given it’s cur­rent appear­ance, I think it’s a bril­liant piece of brand­ing from Toyota.

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9 Responses to “Clever.”

1. eNel says:
   February 21st, 2007 at 10:22 am

   I love the sheikh’s pinky ring.
2. Asshole says:
   February 21st, 2007 at 11:15 am

   The most unfor­tu­nate thing about the Prius is it’s looks, what a turd on wheels.
3. Daniel says:
   February 21st, 2007 at 11:18 am

   Indeed. How­ever, that’s why I find this ad so inter­est­ing. The actual car is the small­est ele­ment on the ad. They’ve decided not to sell the car on it’s looks, or really any of it’s other fea­tures other than the gas mileage (and the political/environmental con­se­quences of said gas mileage increase).

   And as we’ve seen, it’s work­ing.
4. eNel says:
   February 21st, 2007 at 3:18 pm

   Actu­ally, I heard that since the tax credit dropped on the Prius, and more accu­rate MPG esti­mates have come out, there is a huge over­sup­ply of Prius’s on Toyota lots…
5. Daniel says:
   February 21st, 2007 at 3:30 pm

   I think those fac­tors, along with market sat­u­ra­tion (the people who were going to get a Prius, for the most part, already have) are all valid. I’ve read the next ‘generation’ Prius is sup­posed to have much better mileage which will prob­a­bly see another spike in demand. But for now, I think a lot of people are hold­ing out.

   For the price, the only real jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is the sav­ings in MPG. So they have to push that aspect HARD.
6. asshole says:
   February 22nd, 2007 at 1:29 am

   I’ll have to find it again or do my own cal­cu­la­tions but basi­cally the “premium” paid on a hybrid would require you to drive over 120,000 miles in order to reach a break even point on the MPG sav­ings versus price pre­mium over a com­per­a­ble value car like a Chevy Aveo or one of the other match­box cars.
7. Daniel says:
   February 22nd, 2007 at 9:48 am

   Yeah, I did the math on that once and it is well over 100k before you see an actual ‘return’ on your invest­ment. That’s before you com­pute the eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal costs of the cre­ation and dis­posal of bat­ter­ies as well.

   I think that’s the reason Toyota is really push­ing the envi­ron­men­tal angle as hard as they can. From a pure eco­nomic stand­point, it’s a tough sell. But when you sell the ’sizzle’ rather than the actual steak, sales can be pretty strong.

   Once the cost to pro­duce these type of vehi­cles come down a bit, it’ll be a no-​brainer, how­ever.
8. Cory says:
   February 23rd, 2007 at 2:38 pm

   I found myself some­what amazed to read the other day that the US is the 3rd largest oil pro­ducer in the world (behind Russia and Saudi Arabia; which btw might effect US policy towards Russia). I looked up some num­bers and sure enough, we’re number 3, and number 4 is a long way back. Appar­ently, due to vari­abil­ity in supply, there are some months here and there where the US is the biggest world pro­ducer of oil.

   Another curi­ousity, is that due to our pro­duc­tion, we are far less depen­dent on other nations for oil (percentage-​wise) than some devel­oped coun­tries. For exam­ple, France, Ger­many, and Japan must import nearly all of the oil they wish to use. A dis­rup­tion in supply for these coun­tries would be far more cat­a­strophic than for us.

   I wonder if the push for “energy independence” is a US phe­nom­e­non or some­thing hap­pen­ing in these other devel­oped coun­tries as well? The reason I wonder is that there is no solid eco­nomic reason for us to be energy inde­pen­dent. The move­ment makes a lot of “what if” assump­tions that aren’t any more rea­son­able than prepar­ing for a nuke going off in your back­yard; which is to say, it could happen, but the chances are slim.
9. Daniel says:
   February 23rd, 2007 at 3:32 pm

   The only reason energy inde­pen­dence con­cerns me is it will go a long way to ending the cycli­cal nature of our for­eign policy. We only care about the sta­bil­ity of the middle east because we have eco­nomic ties to the area, but a lot of the same insta­bil­ity is because we are in the middle east trying to sta­bi­lize (and in ways, con­trol) it.

   I remem­ber read­ing some­thing about Canada trying to become energy-​independent as well, so we’re not alone, but I think as you men­tioned, not many coun­tries would even be capa­ble of doing so.