Every year, Michigan’s Oakland County is home to the Woodward Dream Cruise, a weekend-long celebration of muscle cars of all stripes.  If you have even a passing interest in performance cars and live in Michigan, you will be doing yourself a great disservice by not making your way down to Woodward Avenue.

This year’s Dream Cruise is officially on August 15, but anyone who is familiar with the Dream Cruise knows that the muscleheads start coming out several weeks beforehand.  And, as you might imagine, the billboards along Woodward are purchased and changed in anticipation of the 1-million-plus visitors the Dream Cruise draws.

Here are this year’s billboards that will be lining Woodward.  As you can see, GM is going all in with some excellent spots.  As a guy who believes every car should have 400 HP and at least one turbo, this is advertising at its finest.

Usually corporate surveys piss me off. They're self-serving, boring and exhibit a complete disrespect for the survey-taker's time. So when I saw The Deck's readership survey, I pretty much scoffed. "Sure, I'll take your shitty little survey, but mainly because I dig Field Note journals, and I see they're a possible prize." Full stop: I was wrong. Here's a clever example of a survey done right. Among the sample questions:

Are you one of those people who thinks you're right all the time, and that if everybody would just listen to you things would be a whole lot better?

And

If you were to become romantically involved with a typeface, which one would it be?

And

Where are you, emotionally speaking?

There's even a trigonometry question that I did my best to solve, but probably buggered to high hell.

This is one of the better 'Get a Mac' ads in recent memory, and, as John Gruber notes, no doubt a response to Microsoft's 'Laptop Hunter' campaign.

Elimination

AppleInsider reports that Microsoft, fed up with Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign, is planning a major anti-Apple advertising blitz to help build the image of Vista, Redmond's flagship OS. This is amusing on several levels, not the least of which is the fact that a push like this is roughly a year late. And Vista has turned out to be a fairly nauseating disaster and users are begging for XP to hang around. And Microsoft has actually created a Vista SKU that's a downgrade license to XP but can still be tallied as a Vista sale. Aside from those, yes, Vista's woes are all about insufficient advertising. When in doubt, blame marketing. Is this what happens when Bill is gone? Some key quips from the AI article:

The company's VP of Vista marketing, Brad Brooks, told attendees at a Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday that the next few months will see a major advertising push that promises to "free the people" through what Vista has to offer and that Microsoft wouldn't take Apple's repeated attacks on Vista reliability without a fight.

Okay Brad. Free the people? Really? Does anyone know what that even means? And what exactly prompted you to start fighting back on Vista's behalf a year into reams of bad press and unprecedented Mac marketshare/mindshare gains? The people have been freed, and they're making personal technology choices that don't involve Microsoft. Hate to say this, but I think it's pretty clear Vista's going down without much of a fight. If it weren't, you wouldn't have so much talk about Windows 7 already.

"You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it's time to take our message forward," Brooks warns Apple. "There's a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it's just plain awful. We've got to get back on the front foot."

My god. Let's see, you have a tired Pearl Harbor cliche, some management horseshit about 'taking a message forward,' a trendy reference to the modern word-of-mouth marketplace where companies don't get to tell us what to think about their products anymore, and finally some more meaningless management speak. Hey Apple, are you listening? Are you? Well we're sick of your shit! We're sick of Justin Long and John Hodgman! We are gonna place ads, boy, and this here sleeping giant who is, um, no longer sleeping is going to grab a quick coffee and take our message forward! We're going to take it forward right up your ass!

He acknowledges, however, that Vista's rough launch has cost the company significant ground and that the ads will as much be about damage control as touting the brand. In a rare glimpse into Microsoft's own view of the launch, Brooks recognizes that Vista "broke a lot of things" and triggered "a lot of pain" in partners trying to support the newer Windows edition.

Oh, absolutely. I think this is a stellar approach. An OS with an admittedly 'rough start' that 'broke a lot of things' and 'caused a lot of pain' will yield an ad campaign that will be about 'damage control' and 'making up lost ground.' Nothing like 'touting your brand' when you're already a few miles underwater. I have an idea, Microsoft. Hear me out. Instead of announcing that you're going to do something, how about you just do it and dispense with the saber-rattling? Because honestly, at this point along the Vista adoption curve, nobody worth his salt is taking you seriously.

Not only do the Germans make fine cars, but they also have clever commercials nailed.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY]

Beats the hell out of this overplayed, let's-ruin-the-NHL-playoffs-on-TV tripe, yes?

(via clusterflock)

I've never before seen such an embarrassing internal marketing video.  It's nearly impossible to get much worse than this, and if you didn't know better, you'd swear it's a bad YouTube joke.

It's not.  It's real, and supposed to be clever.

Microsoft marketing is officially dead.  Notice all the suits in the video: that's Microsoft's remaining stronghold.  That's their lifeblood, and here's your tacit admission of such.  Problem is, this is so stupidly campy that it won't resonate with anyone, let alone enterprises or MS enterprise sales reps.

The video is so bad that I refuse to embed it.  If you want to see it for yourself, see here and keep the bad juju away from me.

In the spirit of Dove's Onslaught campaign, here's a look at a 2007 Redbook cover featuring singer Faith Hill.  Now, Mrs. Hill is an attractive woman, but if for one second you really believe the images in a high-gloss commercial publication, it's about time you wake up.  You're being sold a bill of goods, which is bad to begin with.  Holding women up to this artificial bar is another thing altogether.

Photoshop: the best and worst thing to happen to the notion of seeing is believing.

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