GM + ads + guitar

My co-advisor and officemates had a lengthy, multi-part debate Friday about GM, the bailout, the environment, and ads.

Btw, I also got a guitar on Friday.

Anyway, the thought that came to mind is that GM's commercial during the '08 Olympics were great. This despite the fact that it didn't make me want to buy a GM car. What it did make me want to buy was a Brandi Carlile CD (the ad used her song "The Story"). I saw a similar pattern in 2007, where an Old Navy ad had a catchy song that I wanted to buy, but I had no immediate interest in the sweaters they were selling.

Ads these days actually promote more than one product and more than one brand. I wonder if they ever pool money together and share the cost of the ad instead of having one party pay the other to license their work. I guess the common case is General Megacorp + Starving Musician. In the past it was harder to Joe S. to identify Starving Musician from the ad and purchase a CD. These days, you can just do a Google search. I don't know if it makes sense for GM to pay SM when SM didn't even need to customize the work for the ad.

Anyway it probably doesn't matter (peanuts compared to, say, $14 billion dollars).