99% of the work I create nowadays is car commercials. Compared to anything and everything else you see on TV, they set the quality bar pretty low. You know exactly what I mean.

I’ve done hundreds of them. My work tends to look better than those extreme examples, but nonetheless, most car commercials are doomed before I even get to edit one thing.  I can only imagine that most people who see car commercials on TV either:

a. Tune it out completely, rendering the advertising message useless.

b. Change the channel.

c. Groan/roll eyes/ sigh/other symptom of aggravation.

d. Some combination of a, b, and c.

They are what they are: cheap and quick. I sometimes make 3 commercials in one day from start to finish. The deadlines are tough sometimes, as I work furiously to try and crank something out that is so subpar. Occasionally my attempts to add a bit of style to the car spot are vanquished. Plenty of times I’ve been told to change a commercial I worked on to severely downgrade its overall quality simply because the owner of John Smith Cars wants it that way. Nevermind that I am the artist, I just have to give the client what he wants. 

BUT! Occasionally I get to do something creative, something that can showcase more of my skills. This is part of a commercial I made that is a bit nicer than any of the harsh reality I just spewed.

I actually had a lot of fun making that acid-trip-intense-fake-commercial. It’s mostly a combination of various After Effects expressions to make the objects wiggle, vibrate, and dance in the most obnoxious ways possible. It was a challenge to make a mockery of some of the annoying attention grabbing gimmicks I sometimes am asked to pull.

 Here’s my take on car commercials:

I really don’t think this type of advertising is really successful at all. Car commercials often take the approach of packing 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag. Car dealers don’t want to pay a whole lot for advertising since they don’t have a bottomless pit of money advertising monoliths like Coke, Nike, and Apple do. They try to make their commercials cover all the bases and hope that maybe you retain all or some, or maybe just one thing from their commercial.  Dealers try to cram a line about the inventory, the prices, the rebates, the savings, the guarantees, the service, and the location and push the 30 second commercial to the limit, until it is bursting with chaos. My commercials have had cluttered graphics and titles, incoherent shouting from the announcer, and an overall information overload that leaves the viewer feeling and retaining nothing.

They don’t get it. They treat an automobile like something that is an impulse buy. Nobody is going to go out and buy a car because of all the great savings you promise them on a TV commercial. If they are thinking about buying a car, they will maybe consider your offer, but they are not going to look at your deals exclusively. They are going to shop around. make commercials that are funny, have good production value, and are less aggressive. Work on branding the dealership instead of trying to get viewers to leap off the couch and spend $20,000+ on a car right now.

Wow. </vent>

Eventually I will get burned out on car commercials. I might be burned out right now.