Ground Control to Lincoln Marketing Team

I’ve noticed a couple of new ads for Lincoln automobiles lately. They’re pretty standard fare; cameras sweep over the body of the car, revealing design details that are somehow supposed to make this car better than Lexus or a Cadillac. Then there is the music. I’ve seen two different ads, with covers of two different songs. The first is Cat Power’s rendition of David Bowie’s classic “Major Tom”, the second is Shiny Toy Guns covering Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom (Coming Home)”.

While both songs have their uplifting moments, you have to wonder about associating your car with songs about a man being killed when his vehicle fails.

2

4 thoughts on “Ground Control to Lincoln Marketing Team

  1. Where am I? One second I was in Facebook….the next second I was trapped in this website talking about cars…ha ha ha…just kidding, Jerry. I think this is the first time I’ve been on a blog site and i just freaked out for a minute…have a great day :O)
    Tracy

  2. When I seed it, I ‘membered back to carnival cruise using Iggy Pop “Lust for Life.”

    Here comes Johnny Yen again
    With the liquor and drugs
    And the flesh machine

    I found it bizzarre to pitch liquor and drugs, not to mention the flesh machine to families looking for family fun. Maybe I don’t know enough families.

  3. This is actually the second time Major Tom is being used for a car commercial. (Don’t recall if three or four years ago it was still Lincoln or even Ford.)

    I too couldn’t believe Lust for Life was being used, until I realized that
    a) the catchiness of the riff, and
    b) the desirability of the demographic who actually recognize it
    must always override the matter of lyric appropriateness when it comes to marketing.

    I’ve been wondering ever since Cadillac bought Led Zepplin’s “Rock and Roll” (or even Microsoft the Rolling Stones “Start me up”) if the marketing guys were my age with an appreciation of the music and its context, or just snot-nosed recently minted 20-somethings.

    Modern English’s “I’ll melt with you” still gets used the most, twice for cheese burgers/fast food, most recently for chocolate.

Leave a Reply to Keith Sherwood Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *