Sunday, March 13, 2011

It's only okay if you're famous



The big auto story of last week was about how my nemesis Chrysler had a giant PR nightmare on their hands when an account executive from NMS mixed up his Twitter accounts and posted something (quite funny but corporately inappropriate) on the Chrysler feed that was clearly meant for his own.

In case you have a life and are not glued to the internet the Tweet was:

"I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f*cking drive."

There's a point to be made that nobody anywhere knows how to drive, but that apparently is neither here nor there. Chrysler lost their sh!t over this. NMS fired the offending Tweeter in a misguided and ultimately useless attempt to save the account - Chrysler dumped them anyway.

In defending their action, which effectively put probably about 40 people out of work, Chrysler said, "That commercial featuring the Chrysler 200, Eminem and the City of Detroit wasn't just an act of salesmanship. This company is committed to promoting Detroit and its hard-working people... we can’t afford to backslide now and jeopardize this progress."

And yet…

Eminem, the main figure in this supposedly pro-Detroit ad campaign, is the same guy who made a career out of songs about slicing his wife's throat, stuffing her in the trunk of his car and dumping her body in a lake while their kid watches.

And it turns out he's not such a big fan of the Dirty D, either.

Here are Eminem's own words about the "beloved" city of Detroit:

"That's why the city is filled with a bunch of f*cking idiots still
That's why the first motherf*cker poppin some sh!t he gets killed
That's why we don't call it Detroit, we call it Amityville
You can get capped after just having a cavity filled
Ahahahaha, that's why we're crowned the murder capital still
This ain't Detroit, this is motherf*cking Hamburger Hill!
We don't do drivebys, we park in front of houses and shoot
and when the police come we f*cking shoot it out with them too!
That's the mentality here that's the reality here
Did I just hear somebody say they wanna challenge me here??
While I'm holding a pistol with this many calibres here??
Got some registration and just made this sh!t valid this year?
Cause once i snap i cant be held accountable for my actions
and that's when accidents happen,
when a thousand bullets come at your house
and collapse the foundation around and they found you
and your family in it"

But, ya know. That thing about the traffic. Way worse.

5 comments:

  1. Yet another example of corporate hypocrisy at its best.

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  2. Eminem is a terrible performer and a disgusting person. If I needed another reason to never buy a Chrysler, this is it.

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  3. Ha, one of my favorite Em songs. I disagree that Em is a terrible performer but I do agree that Chrysler handled this poorly, with some creative thinking they could have used the mistake to their benefit.

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  4. If you move product, you can stuff bodies in the trunk. Eminem was a better choice than kid rock o reckon

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  5. Great point. This is a perfect example of bad, misguided PR - PR based on knee-jerk reaction, without doing some pre-PR research. Thus, this is a perfect example of ignorance. Eminem fits that bill too. He is the bowels of human character. Sad to think we consumers are responsible for his rise to fame.

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