Ad Fail: Jeep Cherokee
As Robyn and I were making our way through security at LAX yesterday morning, a large advertising poster loomed over us. Not a bad spot for an ad: a captive audience, certainly, if not an entirely festive one. For the time it took us to remove our shoes, empty our pockets, put our laptops and Ziploc’d toiletries through the scanner, we were subject to its gaze, like the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby.
And what was the pitch, you’re wondering? Oh, don’t be coy: I can hear you wondering. Well, as today’s title would suggest, the makers of the ad thought that Robyn & I oughta getta Jeep. (Just think for a moment how much better that sentence would be if the vehicle in question had been a Jetta. Note to self: approach Volkswagen with snappy new slogan.)
And the slogan: “Plastic Can’t Be Forged.”
Robyn and I had very different reactions to this wisdom. Basically, she got it; I didn’t though in ways that I thought were instructive.
Robyn, as she was meant to, thought the slogan meant something like: “Steel is forged. Plastic isn’t forged. If you want a car that’s well built—forged, with steel—buy a Jeep. It’s not made of plastic like those other cars.” And surely something like this is what Jeep’s going for. Precisely what percentage of a Jeep really is plastic—well, that’s a separate, and snarky, question.
On first reading, on the other hand, I really didn’t get it. Not as in, smart-ass college professor, who “doesn’t get it” for a living, doesn’t get it; not a sort of Columbo “I don’t get it.” It really made almost no sense to me, as an advertising slogan. First, “plastic” can be forged: as I understand it, at least, counterfeit credit and debit cards do circulate, as well as plastic items on the black market (videocassettes, fake phones, etc.).
Even more central to my misunderstanding, though, is a pun I heard in the phrase, that I expect its writers did not intend. Let me be clear about this: I wasn’t seeking to undermine the clear message of the ad; I was genuinely seeking just simply to read it. But here’s what happened: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a very important book to me—important enough that, in some real sense, it often serves as a kind of filter through which I experience “reality.” And the novel closes on a pun (I’ve written about this, in more detail, in the introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of the novel). Writing in his diary, the protagonist Stephen Dedalus declares, in the book’s penultimate sentence: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
So there’s a pun there: Stephen seeks to forge, as in create in a foundry; but the Joyce who puts the words in Stephen’s diary knows that “to forge” means “to counterfeit,” too. It’s what we call irony, kids.
And I heard it in the Jeep ad; and I wasn’t supposed to, I’m pretty darn sure. What I heard was, “Plastic can’t be counterfeited”—which seemed both demonstrably false and a really weird thing for the good folks at Jeep to be saying.
I don’t know for how many others the ad will fail; I wasn’t going to buy a Jeep in any event. But this is what your mother meant by minding your p’s and q’s: this is why we test market things. Because you never can tell when someone’s going to twist your message, not necessarily because doing so gives him pleasure: but because his brain’s wired differently. Screwed up, perhaps, by Literature.
Let’s face it bro, you don’t fit into their demographic. I sincerely doubt that many would make a tie into Joyce. I would ventue to guess that a large majority of the people viewing that Ad don’t even know who Joyce is. Sorry to burst your bubble!
No, no: I mean, seeing a Jeep ad and thinking of Joyce is ridiculous. Would be ridiculous. My point is slightly different: I heard the word “forge” wrong because of Joyce, but I think anyone could, might, hear the word “incorrectly.”
I read it as “counterfeit” the first time, and the bizarreness of claiming an infinitely malleable substance can’t be counterfeit struck me.
Advertising folks are clever. Sinister, yes, but clever. I suspect they were very aware of the double meaning of “forge.” The fact that you thought about it means they won–the ad is in your head, which is what they want. In your case, nothing they could say would persuade you to buy their vehicle, but if you were in the market for a 4WD, the ad would be rattling around in your brain.
Resistance is futile.
Good point, Kenster.
For once, I can say you were not over-thinking on this one. The double meaning must have been intentional.
Considering you were in a line where you have to produce documents for traveling, the word FORGED would have been foremost in my mind as FAKED.
Robyn’s interpretation is, of course, entirely correct also. I don;t care for the ad but,
Ad fail, no, I’d say “mission accomplished”!
OK, I’ve got to admit my response would be the same as yours. I really don’t think that this is a matter of over-intellectualization, though. I’d bet if you played free association with any number of non-academics, their response would be, more often than not, to link the word with fraud, if for no other reason than there’s a lot more of that in this era of identity theft than steel mill activity.
But this also reminds me that I was granted my Ph.D. in English at a particularly bleak time when I was selling cars for a living. (Well, at least they were Hondas, so it’s not as if I were selling something shameful.) One of our strategies for those people who felt guilty about not “buying American” (even though the vast majority of Hondas sold in the US are built in Ohio) was to give them a set of small magnets. We demonstrated how many would stick to a Honda, then told them to go to a lot where “real American” cars were sold and try that experiment there. Some actually came back once they discovered that most US cars have loads of plastic in their makeup, much more than a Honda. (The now defunct Saturn had so much plastic that one actually partially melted as a result of being parked too close to a fire pit at some tailgate party at UConn during my time there.)
That was 1995, and I don’t know about current models. Nor, for that matter, have I ever had any interest in Jeeps, I admit. It’s just that the emphasis on steel is probably a lot of hype just barely within the realm of truthful advertising. Still, I would think the “mad men” who created the ad would be smart enough to know better than to use a provocative word like “forge” that would conjure negative concepts in a lot of minds, not just those of academics, who have a tendency towards Toyotas, Hondas, and Volvos anyway. (Confession: I have a Nissan.) On the other hand, perhaps they were trying to imply that a Jeep can’t be copied because it’s “the real deal.” (In other words, f*** the simulacrum.) But I’m inclined to think that anything can be copied by anyone clever enough to do so.
“Kenster” . . . is that connected in any way to “hipster”?
A synonym, antonym, pseudonym, taxonym, contronym, ???onym . . . ?
Since we’re at this, just what was a “Jeepster” (in Marc Bolan-speak)?
I was just thinking it might speed you through security if you had a plastic Jeep.
Nice thought! A TSA-branded Hummer; you wouldn’t even have to unpack your laptop.
I like the Jeep ads. “Imagined, drawn, carved, stamped, hewn and forged here in America.” It brings back that image of the America of the fifties when the country used to make real things. Now we sit at desks and do ‘virtual’ work, we are a nation of pixel pushers. At a time of recession, bailouts and foreclosures it’s a very comforting theme. Also for the gear head, forged has a connotation of stronger, lighter; you want forged wheels, forged pistons and a forged crankshaft; these are hi-performance parts (generally).
Where the ad fails, I think, is that this car was really done by those rat bastards, the Germans. It was imagined when Mercedes owned Chrysler and has a lot of German engineering in it. And with the multinationals you don’t where anything is coming from, my Ford was Hecho en Mexico, but my friends Civic was put together in Indiana I believe, god knows where the all pieces were made.
I agree with the commenters who said that “fake” is probably the more common meaning that people associate with the word “forge”. So the ad seems to be saying that Jeeps are plastic, and that this is good because it means you can’t duplicate them. Accept no substitute for our plastic vehicle! Fail.